Comment 8 for bug 513848

The load avg is only related to the number of runnable/uninterruptible processes. There can be hundreds of threads and 0.00 load avg if they are all waiting or sleeping.

However, your screenshot shows consistent cpu utilization of 15-20%, so one would think the load avg would be at least 0.2 for at least the 1 minute mark. The load avg is calculated once every 5 seconds inside the kernel. At that point in time, the average is recomputed using the current number of runnable/uninterruptible processes. To have a load avg of 0.00, obviously there could not have been any runnable or uninterruptible processes in the last 5 minutes during every 5 second capture point.

I think it would be most helpful to get identical comparisons between the two distros, preferrably the dmstat output on karmic.