Load Average

#1

My server is constantly under a load average of ~6.

This hasn’t much affected performance, but with serveral ecommerce sites loading up soon… I expect my personal traffic/script usage to be doubling over the next couple of months. Does anyone else see load averages this high, and if so, have you run into any problems?

#2

What’s the CPU utilization?

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#3

As far as I know, we aren’t able to check that from the shell.

#4

Try using top:

#5

nice. thank you. the idle jumps from 50% to .3%. averaging out at around 80% cpu usage or so. spiking everytime php5.cgi loads up.

#6

also, 3.8 of 4 gigs of memory is being used with a 6.3 gig swap file (though most 90% of that is free)

#7

I have to say that sounds like a busy server, though I wouldn’t start panicking yet.

Is it always this busy?

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#8

The server I’m on has had a pretty similar load figure for the last months (a load between 50 and 70 percent every time i check top). The dynamic sites I run are vanity sites without any real traffic, and my big, static files that generate quite a lot of traffic don’t really need cpu, so I won’t have any trouble until I post my first popular blog post…

When I joined DH in June, this server allowed me to view all users processes and other nice stuff, but that doesn’t work anymore, “The Man” must have changed the permissions on that (which really is a Good Thing, I shouldn’t have been able to see that in the first place) so I can’t see whose cool site is eating the cpu.

But I hope DH starts to throw a little more RAM into the servers when they switch to 64 bit Debian…