Documentation of the load average in the manual

Documentation of the load average in the manual

[Eli Zaretskii]

The Emacs User manual says this in "(emacs) Optional Mode Line":

       Emacs can optionally display the time and system load in all mode
    lines.  To enable this feature, type `M-x display-time' or customize
    the option `display-time-mode'.  The information added to the mode line
    usually appears after the buffer name, before the mode names and their
    parentheses.  It looks like this:

	 HH:MMpm L.LL

    Here HH and MM are the hour and minute, followed always by `am' or
    `pm'.  L.LL is the average number of running processes in the whole
    system recently.

The last sentence is inaccurate, at least on GNU/Linux: there, the
load average shows the number of processes that are either running or
ready to run (i.e. waiting in the scheduler's ready-to-run queues).  I
believe the same is true for any Unix system that supports this
feature.

If the reader goes by the manual, she will be unable to explain values
for load average that are larger than the number of processors in the
system.

Do we want to make this description more accurate, perhaps at the
price of making it more technical?  An alternative would be not to
tell the units in which L.LL is measured, making it more vague.  In
that case, perhaps saying something like "values larger than the
number of processors indicate processing congestion" would be enough.

Comments?