Running Perl Script On Cron

I tried using this perl script which supposedly restarts apache when server load reaches 5 and above

Code:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#use strict;
$|++;
open(LOAD,"/proc/loadavg") || die "couldn't open /proc/loadavg: $!
";
my @load=split(/ /,<LOAD>);
close(LOAD);
if ($load[0] > 5) {
`/sbin/service httpd restart`;
}
and placed it in /usr/local/script/loadavg.pl and chmod to 755

and added this to my crontab

*/1 * * * * root /usr/local/script/loadavg.pl

my server load went up to 20 and waited if it will automatically go down via the script but it seems it's not working. I had to restart apache manually.