linux - How high can system load go?

Every time I login to my servers via SSH it flashes me a bit of server info. IE IP Address, Swap Usage, Memory Usage, etc. One of the other things it flashes me is System Load. Now most of the time the system load number is < 0.10 but other times it I've seen it go up to 0.89 (usually around boot).

This this brings up the question, how high can system load go? For instance is it possible for it to go up to 2.00 even 100.00?

Answer

This this brings up the question, how high can system load go? For instance is it possible
for it to go up to 2.00 even 100.00?

Absolutely. Looking at the uptime man page:

   System load averages is the average number of processes that are either
   in a runnable or uninterruptable state.  A process in a runnable  state
   is  either  using the CPU or waiting to use the CPU. A process in unin‐
   terruptable state is waiting for some I/O access, eg waiting for  disk.
   The  averages  are  taken over the three time intervals.  Load averages
   are not normalized for the number of CPUs in a system, so a load  aver‐
   age  of 1 means a single CPU system is loaded all the time while on a 4
   CPU system it means it was idle 75% of the time.

So if you have a lot of processes waiting to run (or a lot of processes blocked waiting for I/O), you're going to have a high load average. This article talks about it in more detail, and has useful links to other resources.

On an unloaded system, the load average will typically be in the range 0 <= load_average <= n, where n is the number of cores on your system.