Why does the load average suggest that the system is idle when it is not?

Issue

• Why does the load averages suggest that the system is idle when it is not?

Sometimes the load averages (i.e. over the last 1, 5 and 10 minutes) suggests the system is entirely idle when it is usually not under my workload. For example $ cat /proc/loadavg:

0.00 0.00 0.00 56/208 27332

The above information indicates that there are 56 active/running (i.e. the value of nr_running()) threads and 208 threads (i.e. the value of nr_threads) on the system. However this is not reflected in the load averages.