load average, which does not reflect an actual increase in CPU use. The idea behind its inclusion is that while disk wait is not the same as CPU-wait, it still reflects how long a user needs to wait.

On modern UNIX systems, the treatment of threading with respect to load averages varies. Some systems treat threads as processes for the purposes of load average calculation: each thread waiting to run will add 1 to the load. However, other systems, especially systems implementing so-called