I have a machine that is an iPlanet portal gateway. This is the only
server process on the machine. It is a dual processor 220R with 2 GB of
RAM. With ~120 users logged in to the portal, the load average on the
gateway varies between 150 and 400. Yes, 150 and 400. I thought that
load average was a number to indicate how busy the cpus of a system
are. I.E. a single CPU machine with the cpu utilized fully would have a
load average of 1, a dual CPU machine with one cpu utilized fully would
have a load average of 1, but the other CPU is idle so the max load
average of the machine, before it has to start doing serious process
swapping, is 2.

Am I wrong? For what its worth, according to top, the CPU is about 30%
idle and there is about 1.7 gig of ram free. The portal server gateway
is a java app with about 2000 threads and it is configured to use 256 meg
of heap.
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Kent