load average
 

load averages: 23.74, 21.24, 27.81

is this high for a freeBSD shared box?

Thx!

Yes

Should be lower than 3.

should be lower than 1

In most cases it's high. As usual there are some excetions when loads can jump a lot withou problems:
1) high loaded email server. If you are using sendmail it usually makes server load jump on high mailing volumes because it fires lots of system flags when accessing to disk (sendmail makes different disk accesses than other programs, this is the reason linux boxes with reiserfs usually jump load a lot when making big mail campaigns. On BSD it makes the same with the default BSD partitions).
2) high speed spawning apache or apache+mysql. If you have a site that takes lots of traffic your apache proccesses will be dying and borning every few seconds. This could be solved by tuning your apache.
3) lots of users logged on the system or lots of proccesses, so the kernel has a huge proccess rotating list.

In any case, the important is the system performance. If it performs ok, then you have to investigate it but it's still not crtycal (could become in the near future).
If it performs bad, then it's already critycal.

Good luck.
PS: I hate BSD.

we know that juicy MUST be sleeping if he has not posted here yet :glugglug

:thumbsup hehehe

thx!