Load average

#1

The load average on my server always seems too high. I asked support about it and they said it was probably the recent network/filer problems but it has not gone away (and was a problem before the recent issues anyway).

Here it is right now:

13:50:28 up 3 days, 20:03, 6 users, load average: 19.33, 18.29, 16.12

This is actually on the low side. It is frequently in the 20’s and I’ve seen it reach into the 50’s.

My site’s PHP performance isn’t too bad but Ruby On Rails is very, very sluggish. What’s most annoying however is the interactive stuff I do on the CLI. I like to develop locally on the server and that is almost always painful. At its worst I can not even run “ls” without a delay of a couple seconds. Bash autocompletion gets very slow, vi takes a while to save and quit, etc.

My site is not high bandwidth by any means - maybe I have been relegated to the worst hardware because of that? My server is currently “catalina” (and I was moved to this server a few months after signing up).

#2

I think part of the problem is that it’s hard to figure out what’s driving up the load average right now. The thing about the filer and switch issues of late is that a lot of their server are effected by it. Even if your data wasn’t stored on that filer, your server may have it mounted and it’s inaccesability is drive up the load.

If you can I’d wait out an other day or two till they have the issues fixed and then see if the load does drop. If it doesn’t drop, then contact support. I know how frustrating it is, but DH is working hard to get things fixed.

–Matttail
art.googlies.net - personal website

#3

I missed the latest update on dreamhoststatus.com when I posted, so maybe that’s part of the problem. Hopefully they get their router problem fixed soon and that will help.

#4