Why is idle machine reported as 1.0 load average?

[B Wooster]

On Wed, 02 Feb 2005 13:31:20 -0700, Robin Laing
<Robin.Laing at drdc-rddc.gc.ca> wrote:
> B Wooster wrote:
> > Using uptime, w, and top - I noticed that the current load average is
> > listed as 1.0 - never falls below 1.0 - even though there is nothing
> > going on on the machine, and top reports 99.8%+ idle time..

> How much memory?
> You have 228 tasks listed?

104 of those processes had "hotplug" in their name. I think there is
some USB strangeness going on, every time I plugin and remove my SD
Card Reader, I think 5-10 processes are created, most of which end up
as zombies (I posted a message about this last week, but no reply on
that yet).

Anyway, I rebooted my box, and now I see uptime is back close to 0.01
when it reports 99% idle.

I guess I'll just have reboot the machine every week or so !