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Some (mostly historical) issues with the Unix load average

Understanding legacy Unix load average quirks helps prevent misinterpreting system load metrics.

Steady
Signal score
25
as of 1d ago
Trajectory
Accelerating
7-day est. ~28

Why this scored 25

every term, weighted
Velocity+2.7 / 40

Engagement gained per hour since the last capture, against the fastest item on its own source

Acceleration+13.1 / 25

Whether that velocity is itself speeding up, as a per-hour rate

Cross-source spread+0.0 / 25

How many independent communities are talking about the same entity

Recency+9.5 / 10

Decays to zero over 14 days

Saturation penalty0.3 / 30

Subtracted once something is big and old — we rank what's next, not what's peaked

Composite25.0

Weights are hand-tuned, not learned — we're calibrating them against realized trends as history accumulates. On a topic's first sighting there's no previous reading to compare against, so acceleration starts from a neutral prior rather than a measurement, and velocity falls back to engagement over its whole lifetime until a second reading exists. Full methodology

Outlook

low confidence · estimate, not a guarantee

7-day

~28

range 040

14-day

~28

range 043

30-day

~28

range 048

Signal history

7-day window (free)
1051

projected trajectory (estimate, not a guarantee)

Entities

unix
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Drop this in a README or blog post — it updates automatically as the score moves.