My understanding of uptime load is that it represents the average number of processes waiting for or using the cpu. I also understand that VPS hosts often use load as way to determine if a user is using too many resources: if the load is over a certain amount for a period of time, then something happens (reboot, throttle down, etc).
What I do not understand is what load means in a shared system such as a VPS (OpenVZ is what I use). For example, if another user is being noisy, that might cause I/O or CPU delays for me. Would this not cause my load to go up? Which then could lead to the possibility of my services being throttled/re-booted even if I were not the heavy user?
Or, does my execution of uptime load somehow take the above in account and not inflate my load based on what others are doing? Or does OpenVS properly identify which container is actually causing the problem and only reboot/throttle the heavy user.