Troubleshoot performance part 5 - /proc/loadavg for seeing if the CPU is the bottleneck

/proc/loadavg for seeing if the CPU is the bottleneck
Another way for looking at CPU usage is to take a look at /proc/loadvg. This file provides a look at the load average in regard to both the CPU and IO over time, as well as additional data used by uptime and other commands. A sample /proc/loadavg file looks similar to the following:

[root@soaserver ~]# cd /proc
[root@soaserver proc]# cat loadavg
0.00 0.00 0.00 1/146 21886
[root@soaserver proc]#
The format is as follows:
avg1 avg2 avg3 running_threads/total_threads last_running_pid

Values of /proc/loadavg

• avg1, avg2, avg3. These are number of threads in running state, averaged over the last minute, last 5 minutes, and last 15 minutes, respectively. 
• running_threads. Number of threads currently in state "running". 
• total_threads. Total number of threads currently existing in the system. 
• last_running_pid. PID of the last process observed in state "running". 

If the amount of the averages is larger than the number of CPU cores, then there are more threads than available CPU Cores and the system is loaded.