Solaris

Code:

NPROC USERNAME  SWAP   RSS MEMORY      TIME  CPU                             
   320 oracle     23G   22G    69% 582:55:11  85%
    47 root      148M  101M   0.3%  99:29:40 0.3%
    53 rafmsdb    38M   60M   0.2%   0:46:17 0.1%
     1 smmsp    1296K 5440K   0.0%   0:00:08 0.0%
     7 daemon   7368K 7392K   0.0%   0:08:35 0.0%
Total: 428 processes, 8117 lwps, load averages: 14.96, 15.73, 16.51

Above ouput is taken from prstat -a on sun database server.Kernel is 5.10 Generic_127127-11. Hardware is Sun-Fire-V890.

1) Can any one tell me why the load average is so high though the cpu utilization is 85%.
2) what is lwps and is it harmfull for the system

Oracle 100% CPU tips
Multi CPU Solaris system shows 100% CPU usage.

Because there are some short periods of time where the run queue is empty and all threads are waiting for something to happen while there are more other periods of time when plenty of threads want a CPU but none is available. To know if this is an issue, you should tell how many CPUs/Cores/Chip Threads are available on your machine.
lwps are light weight processes a.k.a threads. The number of lwps isn't harmful at all.