Several years back the company I worked for ended up picking up some work for a client. Every quarter we'd download a huge trove of TIFFs from some source, and

Several years back the company I worked for ended up picking up some work for a client. Every quarter we'd download a huge trove of TIFFs from some source, and then do some image conversion work before shipping transferring them to the customer's infrastructure. There was a java application that powered the logic side of things, calling out to ImageMagick to do the actual processing and conversion. For whatever reason, after careful benchmarking we settled on a java thread count that happened to get us the peak throughput, but also caused system load average to hit around 400 and keep steady at around that level. The day that happened, and I could show that no application on the server took a performance hit, was the day that I finally persuaded my boss that load average is an interesting stat, but it's not the be-all and end-all, and that a high load average doesn't necessarily correlate to an actual problem.