Comment 1 for bug 588564

This appears to be a general issue with AWS servers. See: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=12930 (Mercury running on rackspace cloud shows avg load of .07).

Per http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/en-US/Reference_Guide/s2-proc-loadavg.html, the 4th value is the number of currently running processes and the total number of processes.

CPU load is zero, htop and iotop confirm no activity on the system.

This bug has been logged by others:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-ec2/+bug/574910