I don't know Paige.
slope = rate = something per something else, like miles per hour.
So if I am traveling at 50 miles per hour, then in 1 hour I should travel 50 miles.
Now if I traveled 40 miles in the first hour, 50 miles in the second hour, 60 miles in the third hour, and 50 miles in the fourth hour, I averaged 50 miles per hour. the plot would be 40 at 1 hour, 90 at 2 hours, 150 at 3 hours, 200 at 4 hours. Let's say I do this same thing every day for some number of days, but some days the pattern may be 45, 55, 55, 45, or 50,40,60,50, or ... Now this will produce a tight cigar shaped spread of data, with time for X and distance for Y. The slope will be 50 miles per hour = average rate. And a histogram will show counts for each hourly distance.
Now, in my data, I have RSS which is the real memory usage of a process.
I count the number of processes in each second, and sum the sizes in each second. I then summarize the data into 5-minute intervals, taking the min, mean, median and max RSS's and cnts. In this case, to compare it to above, I have the total distance traveled for some total number of hours. So, if I regress each of these, the means, the medians, the maxs, then I will have the average size per count, the average mean size per mean cnt, the average median size per median cnt, and the average max size per max cnt. At least, that is my interpretation. So, for a slope = rate of 10,403 per cnt, if cnt = 1, then size = 10,403 = average size.