Yuan Yao, An Oracle ACE's Blog

In the “Host CPU” section of an AWR report, the Load Average Begin and Load Average End metrics represent the system workload at the beginning and end of the AWR snapshot interval, respectively. These values are obtained from the LOAD column in the DBA_HIST_OSSTAT table.

If you are unfamiliar with this metric, you can refer to this web link for more details.

This brings up a question: What does the LOAD value actually represent? Specifically, over what time interval is this workload calculated?

We can clarify this through a simple experiment:

From this experiment, we can confirm that Oracle’s LOAD value corresponds to the 1-minute load average (ldavg-1), which represents the system workload averaged over the most recent minute.

It’s worth noting that other metrics in this section—such as %User, %System, %WIO, and %Idle—represent averages over the entire snapshot interval. Therefore, you should not attempt to correlate the LOAD value directly with these metrics, as the load average reflects a 1-minute interval and can fluctuate within the whole interval.