How to read the Stock CPU Usage data

Question

On Ice Cream Sandwich, an option in the Developer Options is \"Show CPU Usage\", which adds an overlay on the screen (see screenshot below).

My question is, how do I re

Answer 1

More about "load average" showing CPU load over 1 minute, 5 minutes and 15 minutes

Linux, Mac, and other Unix-like systems display “load average” numbers. These numbers tell you how busy your system’s CPU, disk, and other resources are. They’re not self-explanatory at first, but it’s easy to become familiar with them.

WIKI: example, one can interpret a load average of "1.73 0.60 7.98" on a single-CPU system as:

during the last minute, the system was overloaded by 73% on average (1.73 runnable processes, so that 0.73 processes had to wait for a turn for a single CPU system on average).
during the last 5 minutes, the CPU was idling 40% of the time on average.
during the last 15 minutes, the system was overloaded 698% on average (7.98 runnable processes, so that 6.98 processes had to wait for a turn for a single CPU system on average) if dual core mean: 798% - 200% = 598%. 

You probably have a system with multiple CPUs or a multi-core CPU. The load average numbers work a bit differently on such a system. For example, if you have a load average of 2 on a single-CPU system, this means your system was overloaded by 100 percent — the entire period of time, one process was using the CPU while one other process was waiting. On a system with two CPUs, this would be complete usage — two different processes were using two different CPUs the entire time. On a system with four CPUs, this would be half usage — two processes were using two CPUs, while two CPUs were sitting idle.

To understand the load average number, you need to know how many CPUs your system has. A load average of 6.03 would indicate a system with a single CPU was massively overloaded, but it would be fine on a computer with 8 CPUs.

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