misleading load average

[Jordan Brown]

The load average is calculated by examining the run queue every second,
or something like that.  This is done _after_ alarms go off, but _before_
the programs get to run, so a program which sleeps for a second, does a little,
sleeps for a second, etc, will up the load average without affecting actual
system load significantly.  "tail -f" is one example of this; there are other
programs which look for logins and logouts which do similar things.