Explanation of everything you can see in htop/top on Linux

For the longest time I did not know what everything meant in htop.

I thought that load average 1.0 on my two core machine means that the CPU usage is at 50%. That's not quite right. And also, why does it say 1.0 ?

I decided to look everything up and document it here.

They also say that the best way to learn something is to try to teach it.

Table of Contents

htop on Ubuntu Server 16.04 x64

Here is a screenshot of htop that I am going to describe.

Uptime

Uptime shows how long the system has been running.