title: Determining “System Load”
body: <p>Does anyone know an elegant way to determine “System Load” preferably using Windows performance counters?  In this case I mean “System Load” in the classical (UNIX) sense of the term and not in the commonly confused “CPU Utilization” percentage.  </p>
  
  <p>Based on my reading … “System Load” is typically represented as a float, defining the number of processes in a runnable state (i.e. not including the number of processes that are currently blocked for one reason or another) that could be run at a given time.  Wikipedia gives a good explanation here - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_(computing)" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_(computing)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_(computing)</a></a>.</p>
  
  <p>By-the-way I’m working in C# so any examples in that language would be greatly appreciated. </p>