what's an "average" server load?

[arcadian_girl]

Originally Posted by Erwin

This is rough, but as a general rule, (and again, this is my simplistic understanding), for every 1 CPU, server load of 1 means that CPU is used 100%, so if you have dual CPUs, server loads under 2 is good. 4 CPUs, server loads up to 4 is good. Someone can probably correct me and explain better, but that's my rule of thumb.

thanks for this..i just checked, and mine says i'm on 4 cpu's, and my numbers are still around 3.75, so thats good, no?

talked to my host today about upgrading my account (need more bandwidth/space) and they didn't say anything about server loads, so i guess it's not a problem...

[Erwin]

Originally Posted by arcadian_girl

thanks for this..i just checked, and mine says i'm on 4 cpu's, and my numbers are still around 3.75, so thats good, no?

talked to my host today about upgrading my account (need more bandwidth/space) and they didn't say anything about server loads, so i guess it's not a problem...

On 4 CPUs, that's probably still within acceptable limits. Is the site running okay? That's one of the main things.

[arcadian_girl]

yep, it runs fine, it's pretty fast, no problems...

[sambah]

Originally Posted by Zachery

No, most versions of top are not taking into account multiple processors. For every real core a load of 1+(cores) is accectable.

1 processor 1 core load of 1 is ok
2 processors 1 core each load of 2 is ok
4 processors 2 cores each load of 8 is accectable.

All "load average" indicates is a rough idea of the number of queued processes waiting for a resource plus active (currently running) processes.

When you see numbers like 1.43 1.47 3.45 it indicates the load average over 3 different periods (1m, 5m, 15m)

Its important to note that "load average" doesnt accurately depict how busy your system is, or why your system is busy.

You could have 1 process running and nothing queued, and have 100% CPU useage, or you could be running a backup with 100% HD/Network useage. That would have a knockon effect to all the other processes in a potential queue.

On the other hand you could have 20 and queued apache threads and be at 1% cpu load.

The number of cores/CPU's etc makes no difference to the load average (which is obvious from the above explanation.

What does load average actually tell you then? If it's consistently very high it means one or some of your resources is probably overloaded.

A very *general* idea of a good load average is <3.00. However it depends on many variables