"monitoring and throttling are 2 different things"

Obviously.

"the maintenance daemon just sleeps again if the load is higher than a configured threshold and picks up its chores when the other daemons are idle."

If this is why you want to get the load average I suggest reading BrowserUks advice.

In reply to Re^9: portable way to get system load average by marto
in thread portable way to get system load average by loadaverage

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