This analysis cleared up a mystery for me. I've noticed that when a server app is under heavy load in Linux, the load average goes high if the bottleneck is the

This analysis cleared up a mystery for me. I've noticed that when a server app is under heavy load in Linux, the load average goes high if the bottleneck is the CPU or the disk, but the load average goes low if the bottleneck is network resources (like databases or microservice calls). I know why that happens, but it's very unintuitive and it confused me when I was new to Linux. I thought load average would measure the CPU load only. Now I know the historical reasons for measuring system load instead of CPU load. I kind of like it the way it is since it's handy to be able to distinguish network load from CPU+disk load just by looking at the load average. However, since the load average includes other stuff as well, sometimes I still don't know what the load average really means.