In this tutorial we will learn,4 different commands to check the load average in linux.Loadaverage is the system load,which is a measure of the amount of computational work that a computer system performs.When you run the command in output,you will see one, five, and fifteen minute moving load average of the system.The practical of load average command is done in Red Hat,CentOS,Ubuntu and Debian system.
The below given command is common in all above given linux distros.

Command 1: Run the command, “cat /proc/loadavg” .

root@localhost:~]# cat /proc/loadavg
0.18 0.28 0.30 2/527 4237
root@localhost:~]#

Command 2 : Run the command, “w” .

[root@localhost:~]# w
09:07:09 up 8:18, 2 users, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
root tty1 – 00:52 10:52 0.13s 0.13s -bash
root pts/0 192.168.122.1 01:01 0.00s 0.34s 0.00s w
[root@localhost:~]#

Command 3 : Run the command, “uptime” .

[root@localhost ~]# uptime
09:08:57 up 8:20, 2 users, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
[root@localhost ~]#

Command 4: Run the command, “top” . See the first line of top command’s output

[root@localhost ~]# top
top – 09:10:32 up 8:21, 2 users, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
Tasks: 93 total, 2 running, 91 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.3%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.3%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 1030908k total, 934772k used, 96136k free, 76852k buffers
Swap: 2064376k total, 0k used, 2064376k free, 711632k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2232 root 20 0 2672 1080 856 R 0.7 0.1 0:00.10 top
1377 nrpe 20 0 5972 1076 688 S 0.3 0.1 0:03.56 nrpe
1649 root 20 0 12476 3460 2708 S 0.3 0.3 0:03.28 sshd
1 root 20 0 2872 1372 1168 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.73 init
2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd