[thelist] how high constitutes troublesome load average.

[Robert Lee]

Bob,

The 3060 is a dual core CPU, so if your only seeing two CPU's listed they
have a single chip. With that 1.4 or 1.5 would be an ideal high load
average. 

If the machine is running well when you see 2.5, 3.33, 4.18, then it could
be that those numbers are ok for that particular server, but consistent
loads over 2 means that processes are waiting for CPU time. The one and five
minute averages (the first two numbers) aren't as critical, since they could
just represent a short term spike, but if you are consistently seeing a 15
minute load of 8 + then that means that there are on average 8 processes
being handled by two CPU's, meaning that on average 6 processes are waiting.


Keep in mind that there are lots of other factors that could make a machine
slow down (IO, DB, etc.), and load average is just one factor, but a
continually high load sure doesn't help.

Budget hosts tend to milk a machine for all it's worth, but you may be able
to get them to move you to another machine with less load. 

HTH,
Rob


-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Bob Meetin
Sent: Thursday, October 08, 2009 7:28 PM
To: the >> "thelist at lists.evolt.org"
Subject: Re: [thelist] how high constitutes troublesome load average.

Robert Lee wrote:

> It depends upon the number of CPU cores on the machine.
>
> For the 15 minute average (the far right number), you don't want to 
> see much
> more than .7 for each core on the machine, and anything above 1 per 
> core is
> reason for concern.
> For a Dual Quad Core machine (8 CPU's) you'd probably like to see it stay
> below 6, but lower would be nicer. Of course this doesn't help much if you
> don't know how many processor(s) the shared hosting box has.
>
> HTH,
> Rob
>
> I have a couple sites on a shared hosting server which commonly runs a
> little slow in my opinion and if I check I see what I think is high load
> average, but which is probably somewhat relative. With data driven
> sites (CMS) I tend to think performance is more critical than with
> static, HTML sites. But anyway, how high is unreasonal?
>
> 06:55:01 up 51 days, 9:15, 2 users, load average: 2.50, 3.33, 4.18
> 08:05:02 up 51 days, 10:25, 2 users, load average: 10.13, 10.50, 8.81
> 08:30:02 up 51 days, 10:50, 1 user, load average: 19.05, 12.61, 9.62
> 11:32:01 up 51 days, 13:52, 2 users, load average: 35.37, 26.39, 17.53
>
> -Bob
>
Thx - keep in mind hardware is not a core skill of mine.  Logged into 
cPanel here is what I find (in addition to 4GB RAM):

Processor #1 Vendor: GenuineIntel
Processor #1 Name: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 3060 @ 2.40GHz
Processor #1 speed: 2399.990 MHz
Processor #1 cache size: 4096 KB

Processor #2 Vendor: GenuineIntel
Processor #2 Name: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 3060 @ 2.40GHz
Processor #2 speed: 2399.990 MHz
Processor #2 cache size: 4096 KB

In my last exchange with a tech the response was pretty casual that the 
load is now down below 20 which is apparently fine?

-Bob

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