No Linux, os processos bloqueados também contribuem para as médias de carga. O comando ps -Al
lista todos os processos. Na segunda coluna (S for State) de sua saída, você encontrará os estados do processo. Na maioria das vezes, tenho processos esperando pelo disco "D", que são contados para as médias de carga.
A lista completa de estados da página man do ps é
D Uninterruptible sleep (usually IO)
R Running or runnable (on run queue)
S Interruptible sleep (waiting for an event to complete)
T Stopped, either by a job control signal or because it is being
traced.
W paging (not valid since the 2.6.xx kernel)
X dead (should never be seen)
Z Defunct ("zombie") process, terminated but not reaped by its
parent.
Exemplo de saída
F S UID PID PPID C PRI NI ADDR SZ WCHAN TTY TIME CMD 4 S 0 1 0 0 80 0 - 4906 poll_s ? 00:00:23 init 1 S 0 2 0 0 80 0 - 0 kthrea ? 00:00:02 kthreadd 1 R 0 3 0 99 80 0 - 0 ? 01:00:02 runner 1 D 0 4 0 1 80 0 - 0 ? 01:00:02 loader
Se estes fossem seus únicos processos, veríamos uma carga de aproximadamente 2, 1 para o "corredor" de CPU e outro 1 para o carregador que está esperando pelo disco.
Muito precisa é a informação disponível em Wikipedia
An idle computer has a load number of 0. Each process using or waiting for CPU (the ready queue or run queue) increments the load number by 1. Most UNIX systems count only processes in the running (on CPU) or runnable (waiting for CPU) states. However, Linux also includes processes in uninterruptible sleep states (usually waiting for disk activity), which can lead to markedly different results if many processes remain blocked in I/O due to a busy or stalled I/O system.1 This, for example, includes processes blocking due to an NFS server failure or to slow media (e.g., USB 1.x storage devices). Such circumstances can result in an elevated load average, which does not reflect an actual increase in CPU use (but still gives an idea on how long users have to wait).