This is a selfmade diagram that tries to explain what these three numbers from the Load Average want to say. There's almost no text because I wanted to make it usable in other languages than English. In this Diagram you see any random load. In the time period of 15 minutes it's value is getting smaller and smaller. If you paint a graph (like I did in this picture), you see how it's going down. The background "colors" are painted to show that the values aren't "fix" values from these times but from the whole time period until the "now"-label. E.g. the -15min-Value is the average value from the whole 15minutes and not a "snapshot" value from t = -15 min.

I think these graphics are nice for explaining a bit more demonstrative how the "load average" works. For me it has always been an abstract thing ;-)

There are currently two other selfmade SVG-diagrams which look exactly the same but with different values and graphs:

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  Load Average1.svg (this picture)
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  Load Average2.svg
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  Load Average3.svg