Load Averages

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

Can anyone with some Unix experience tell me what a good load average for a web hosting server is? My ionServ account is always below 0.5, but another account which I have goes above 1 sometimes, and the status in CPanel goes to red. I asked the host, and they said that it's normal, and that CPanel's way of measuring the load isn't good.

Can anyone clarify this please?

4WebHelp Addict Joined: 07 Jan 2002 Posts: 1060

If it goes red, yeah it is classified as high, but doesn't really make much difference if the load is below about 10, my server shoots up high once a day or so, but doesn't seem to effect peformance at all

My Current averages are : 1.40 1.12 1.15

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

So 0.2 is great then? That is what it is usually like at ionServ, but that's probably because they have so few clients Smile

.

4WebHelp Addict Joined: 07 Jan 2002 Posts: 1060

Yeah, thats fine, until someone decides to run some resource hogging CGI Proxy Script / UBB etc, and it'll soon shoot up!

Best way to check how full your server is to download the sysinfo script from http://phpsysinfo.sourceforge.net/ , will give you an output like this :

http://ecddns.com/sysinfo/

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

Yeah, but I think ionServ don't allow any CGI bulletin boards, at least they don't allow the known resource hogging ones Smile

4WebHelp Addict Joined: 07 Jan 2002 Posts: 1060

Daniel wrote:

Yeah, but I think ionServ don't allow any CGI bulletin boards, at least they don't allow the known resource hogging ones Smile

Ikonboard is banned on my host, along with UBB, but they have been known to hide them up by renaming the files........

Posted: Sun Sep 22, 2002 10:38 pm (21 years, 7 months ago)

In general, load average means absolutly nothing.

If you have SSH access, run the top command and have a look at the cpu idle time, that will give a much better reflection on the server load.

Heres the results from mine...

Quote:

3:41pm up 37 days, 7:13, 5 users, load average: 0.97, 0.84, 0.89
149 processes: 135 sleeping, 3 running, 1 zombie, 10 stopped
CPU0 states: 0.0% user, 2.0% system, 0.0% nice, 97.0% idle
CPU1 states: 2.0% user, 2.0% system, 0.0% nice, 94.0% idle
Mem: 1031056K av, 1002216K used, 28840K free, 0K shrd, 113420K buff
Swap: 522072K av, 49480K used, 472592K free 642688K cached

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
17123 rawk 15 0 1084 1084 824 R 2.9 0.1 0:00 top
17126 cpanel 17 0 2092 2092 1240 R 1.9 0.2 0:00 php
16833 nobody 15 0 0 0 0 Z 0.9 0.0 0:00 httpd <defunct>
17125 cpanel 16 0 2972 2624 2028 S 0.9 0.2 0:00 cpaneld
1 root 15 0 176 144 124 S 0.0 0.0 1:21 init
2 root 0K 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 migration_CPU0
3 root 0K 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 migration_CPU1
4 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:10 keventd
5 root 34 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:20 ksoftirqd_CPU0
6 root 34 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:19 ksoftirqd_CPU1
7 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 15:10 kswapd
8 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 13:04 bdflush
9 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 2:39 kupdated
10 root 25 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 mdrecoveryd
16 root 25 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 scsi_eh_0
17 root 25 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 scsi_eh_1

As you can see the cpus are practically doing nothing and at the time I ran the command, the actuall running of the command was the most server intensive thing happening on the box.

Team Member Joined: 09 Jan 2002 Posts: 147 Location: UK

AFAIK it also depends on the number of cpu's on the server. Divide the load number by the number of cpu's to get a comparable value.

Peter

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

That's what I heard, but how can you get a load of 24? I heard someone say that was their server's load average... Question

4WebHelp Addict Joined: 07 Jan 2002 Posts: 1060

Daniel wrote:

That's what I heard, but how can you get a load of 24? I heard someone say that was their server's load average... Question

server0028.freedom2surf.net was 34.58 the other day, trouble is they have safe mode on so you can't run a sysinfo script to see exactly how powerful their servers are.........

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

Yeah, noticed that too (that it doesn't work with safe mode). And phpsysinfo doesn't work on FreeBSD, which is what 4WebHelp is running on... Sad

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

I had a go with phpSysInfo, and this is what I came up with:

4WebHelp.net load averages:
1.09 1.07 1.01
4WebHelp.net uptime:
40 days, 1 hours, 12 minutes

My site at ionServ load averages:
0.21 0.05 0.01
My site at ionServ uptime:
17 days 22 hours 26 minutes