[CentOS] Load Average

Maybe somewhat of a vague question, but what would constitute a moderate
and a heavy load as depicted by "top" on any particular machine?  I am
trying to justify running this machine with near 100% cpu utilization on
both, with load averages between 5 and 5 according to top.  I don't
particularly see any significant slowdown in the running processes, but
there is a chance the disk I/O might become an issue if too many things
are going on at once.  As for actual running processes, it varies
between 5 and 9, depending on time of day.  Memory is not really an
issue, even tho usage tops out around 1.3 - 1.4Gb, and only a small
usage =< 500k swap.

X does seem to get pretty sluggish at those load levels, and I've
thought about dumping back to a text console for most of the runtime,
but I like my Xterms and monitoring applets.


Sam
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