&gt; Sorry, I was sloppy. I meant that it generates CPU load somewhere (or I&#x2F;O load, for those OSes where those two are cleanly separated).<p>Not necessarily. In the scenario I outlined to icebraining, &quot;load&quot; is generated (on the app server) by simple busy waits due to lock congestion: Full table locks by mysqldump block the database server to clients, so the database server itself is seeing negligible load (it&#x27;s only serving one client after all).<p>&gt; If you measure the CPU load on half the CPUs that are involved in serving a user, you&#x27;re not really measuring anything<p>I&#x27;d rather argue that the Unix&#x2F;Linux CPU load metric is meaningless either way, except in a vague &quot;something&#x27;s wrong <i>somewhere</i>, probably&quot; way.