This is the answer.
on p2pool, load average: 0.98 0.92 0.87
vs
ozco, load average: 0.19 0.16 0.20
You do understand what the load average figures are telling you, right? It is simply a count of how many processes running on the system needed CPU time per second during that interval, it does not tell you anything at all about the actual CPU time spent servicing those processes.
Eg, if I do a
while /bin/true; do echo "."; sleep 1; done
The load average will show as 2, even though you can probably see that the actual amount of CPU time spent was likely < 0.001% ?
A high load average may be an indication of the system being CPU starved, but I'd judge "high load average" to be 10-12x the number of CPUs present in the system, depending on the type of processes the machine is running.