[black_eagle]

If you have a load average of 4 on a quad-core CPU, that means that all four cores are at 100% utilisation for whatever duration you are measuring (1,5, or 15 minutes).  If, for instance, the load average was 6, then you would need a six-core processor running at 100% on all 6 cores to meet the load demands.

Regardless, I'm pretty confident that an idle % of 93.5 and a load of 9.6% for Kodi itself, coupled with a load average over 15 minutes of 0.17 means that there is no stress or high load on that system.

Depending on how/where the OP is determining the CPU load, 40% at idle is a ridiculously high figure I would have thought.

[P.Kosunen]

Code:

top - 18:42:54 up 22 days,  3:16,  1 user,  load average: 2.11, 2.15, 2.17
Tasks: 108 total,   1 running,  62 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu0  :  0.3 us,  0.3 sy,  0.0 ni, 93.6 id,  5.8 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu1  :  0.3 us,  0.3 sy,  0.0 ni, 92.5 id,  6.8 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu2  :  0.0 us,  1.0 sy,  0.0 ni, 99.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu3  :  0.3 us,  0.3 sy,  0.3 ni, 97.0 id,  2.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem :  8044056 total,  6758768 free,   402172 used,   883116 buff/cache
KiB Swap:        0 total,        0 free,        0 used.  7089704 avail Mem

My NUC VDR box shows constant 2.1+ load averages, but system is mostly idling, CPU usage is usually between 5-10%. So it's not just CPU load, IO wait time can keep those numbers up too. (I assume in my case it's because USB TV cards.)