title: Understanding load average vs. cpu usage
body: <p>Okay, I'm very much a Windows user myself, so my knowledge of Linux-y type things is a bit limited.</p>
  
  <p>However it was my general understanding that "Load Average" is an indication of how many processed are being run at any given time, on average over the last minute, five minutes and... fifteen minutes?</p>
  
  <p>Anyway, I've been monitoring my server because we had a big opening and lots of people!</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/kXbsLtZ.png" alt="See?"></p>
  
  <p>I've been watching <code>top</code> and noticed something that seemed contrary to what I thought I knew.</p>
  
  <p>If the load average is at 7, with 4 hyper-threaded processors, shouldn't that means that the CPU is working to about 7/8 capacity?</p>
  
  <p>Why, then was it showing 50.0%id? How can it be idle half the time?</p>