proc_loadavg(5)

💖 proc_loadavg(5) 💖

okay bestie, listen — this is the manual page for /proc/loadavg, aka the load average file, and it's genuinely one of the most iconic little files in all of Linux. no cap. it's filed under File Formats Manual, and it's about to become your new obsession. 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

/proc/loadavg — load average 👑

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

📂 /proc/loadavg

okay so. this file is giving five whole fields of absolutely vital information and we're gonna go through every single one, no skipping, fr fr. 💅

• fields 1, 2, and 3 — these are your load average figures, bestie! they tell you the number of jobs in the run queue (state R) or waiting for disk I/O (state D), averaged over 1, 5, and 15 minutes respectively. and here's the tea: they're literally the same load average numbers that uptime(1) and other programs hand you. same numbers, different font. 😌
• field 4 — this one's a two-for-one special, two numbers separated by a slash (/). 🎀
  • the number before the slash — how many kernel scheduling entities (that's processes and threads, babe) are currently runnable.
  • the number after the slash — how many kernel scheduling entities currently exist on the system.
• field 5 — the PID 👑 of the process that was most recently created on the system. the freshest lil guy. the newest baby. 🍓

ngl this is the file your monitoring dashboard is secretly obsessed with. now you know what it's actually saying. 💀

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🫶 SEE ALSO 🫶

• proc(5) — go read it, it's the whole family tree 🌈

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! you ate that. 💖✨

sending this off with love from the Linux man-pages 6.20 girls, dated 2026-02-08 — mwah, stan /proc/loadavg, bye!! 🎀🦋💜