The unit of system load metric is “number of processes/threads” (or tasks as the scheduling unit is called on Linux).On classic Unixes, it only counts the demand for CPU (threads in Runnable state)

The system load metric aims to represent the system “resource demand” as just a single number.

Troubleshooting high system load on Linux.

You can drill down into the “linux system load in thousands” and “high system load, but low CPU utilization” problem patterns too. In this post I will show you how to break down Linux system load by the load contributor or reason. The best way to install the htop is using snap because it works well on any of the Linux distros.High System Load with Low CPU Utilization on Linux? In most of the distros, the top is installed by default, and we have to install the htop manually. In this, we can also scroll horizontal as well as vertical. As compared to the top, the htop UI has better quality. The htop's default display is more user-friendly. On the other hand, the htop command offers a better quality-of-life experience. In terms of system monitoring both commands offer the same functionality.

st: st is the time lost for running a virtual machine, which is also called 'steal time.'.

si: si is the time spent servicing software interrupts.

hi: hi is the time spent servicing hardware interrupts.

wa: wa means the amount of time spent waiting for I/O request to complete.

ni: ni is the time spent to run the process with a custom (manually set) excellent value.

sy: sy is the time spent running 'kernel space' processes.

us: The amount of time it takes to run the process for individual users in the 'user space.'.

Each value indicates how much time the CPU spends performing a task. In the above output, the main line to focus on is the line number third.

Linux command line cpu usage