I have an odd situation here, after a recent reboot my system seemed *very* slow indeed, took ages to start the X desktop etc. and when I looked at the load average with 'uptime' it was over 5 which is pretty silly considering there is really nothing much happening.
While the X desktop was still thinking about appearing I ran a virtual console, logged in (even that was a bit slow) and ran tops. Tops reported virtually nothing consuming processor time.
So what's going on, why is my system slow, especially when starting, but nothing actually seems to be doing much.
This is a Core 2 Duo Quad core processor with 8Gb of memory so really should be quite quick - especially when doing nothing!
Running uptime now (40 minutes after power-up) the load average is 0.03 which is more like what I'd expect to see?
Is there any way to see what that load average is indicating?