So what you are looking at a set of three numbers; in this case they are 6.98, 4.93, 2.92. These numbers stand for the load percentage over the last minutes, 5 minutes, and 15 minutes respectively. What's that mean? Given the data above, over the last minute I was loading the processor 698% of the intended load over the last minute, 493% over the last 5 minutes, and 292% over the last 15 minutes.

A normal load set would be something like .42, .35, .38, meaning you haven't done too much that is processor intensive. It's very bad to stress your processor A LOT in a short time, but it's nothing to worry about every now and then. You generally don't want to make your machine have a higher load average than 5 for more than a minute or two at a time.

Moral of the story: try not to do too many things at once that are processor intensive (I.E. encode a cd while watching an H.264 video, while checking your email, while chatting away on AIM).

For more information on CPU Load Computing check out the Wikipedia article on the topic.

Here's some proof... I went to the Apple Developer site and got a nice big file to download with both downloaders. Well, here's what happened:

On top is the DownThemAll! download window downloading at 2.76 MB/second and on bottom is the standard Firefox downloader downloading at .54 MB/second. The standard downloader took 26 minutes to download the whole 938.2MB file, while DownThemAll! took only 6 minutes. Wow, literally over 4 times faster.

How is that even possible? Apparently DownThemAll! downloads your file in parts, in other words instead of tackling the entire file at once it downloads 5 different parts of the file at the same time(5 is standard but you can change it to anything from 1-10) and puts them all together after they are finished.

Moral of the story, definitely check out DownThemAll! Read more about it, or if you're using Firefox 2 right now and you want to try it, click here to plug-in the file.

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