load averages
 

load average: 1.74, 4.15, 3.18

That's mine. Is this about average? What is yours? Can anyone give me some background on load averages?

In short and simple words..
Load average is the number of processes waiting for processing each clock cycle (CPU). The first number is 1 minute average, the second is 5 minute average and the last is 15 minutes average.
In general it is basically advised to have less that 1 per-cpu - so if you have a 2 cpu server, its advisable to have a load average of less than 2 (especially in the long run).
More than 1 per cpu means that there are processes that are waiting in queue to be processed and that is "inefficient".
BUT I would add this - what matters is the response time of your servers - NOT the load average. Load average may be an indication of load problem but I know servers who run very well with load average of 6 per cpu and even more. Measure your key requests response time - and if you are satistied, its good enough.
Your numbers seems ok though notice your 1 minute is lower than the 5 - which means "now" its better than the average (maybe your server was busy doing something). If you have 2 CPU its good enough. If 1 cpu - can be better..
Trying to solve load problems and reduce load average is always a good thing but you have to know what it is that raises the load average.

:2 cents:

It also depends a lot on software design.

Some software pushes load averages much harder than others, while accomplishing the same task in the same time.

I have seen some webservers at a 100+ load average running apache, fairly efficiently, move to thttpd, with a load average of 0.5, and still accomplish the exact same goal.

Load average is not a good way of checking server health, in and of itself.

One of the servers I take care of was running about what yours was but it also had a lot of zombie processes. Reducing the number of perl processes eliminated most of the zombie processes and reduced the server load. (the server had 11k perl processes running per hour)

if you have perl ad rotator scripts get rid of them and try a php ads rotator if you want to cut down on load and zombies

Brian

About a teaspoon and a half.....