Editing Load (computing) (section)

== CPU load vis-à-vis CPU utilization ==
The comparative study of different load indices carried out by Ferrari et al.<ref name="Empirical load">Ferrari, Domenico; and Zhou, Songnian; "[http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1987/CSD-87-353.pdf An Empirical Investigation of Load Indices For Load Balancing Applications]", Proceedings of Performance '87, the 12th International Symposium on Computer Performance Modeling, Measurement, and Evaluation, North Holland Publishers, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 1988, pp. 515–528</ref> reported that CPU load information based upon the CPU queue length does much better in load balancing compared to CPU utilization. The reason CPU queue length did better is probably because when a host is heavily loaded, its CPU utilization is likely to be close to 100%, and it is unable to reflect the exact load level of the utilization. In contrast, CPU queue lengths can directly reflect the amount of load on a CPU. As an example, two systems, one with 3 and the other with 6 processes in the queue, are both very likely to have utilizations close to 100%, although they obviously differ.{{original research inline|date=May 2013}}