Questions tagged [load-average]

In UNIX family Operating Systems, the load average represents the average system load over a period of time.

In UNIX family Operating Systems, the load average represents the average system load over a period of time. It conventionally appears in the form of three numbers which represent the system load during the last one-, five-, and fifteen-minute periods. It's calculated according CPU usage, Disk I/O, Network I/O.

106 questions
60
votes
5 answers

How to understand the memory usage and load average in linux server

I am using a linux server which has 128GB of memory and 24 cores. I use top to see how much it is used. Its output is pasted at the end of the post. Here are two questions: (1) I see that each of the running processes occupies a very small…
Tim
  • 1,467
  • 3
  • 25
  • 38
40
votes
8 answers

High CPU utilization but low load average

We are running into a strange behavior where we see high CPU utilization but quite low load average. The behavior is best illustrated by the following graphs from our monitoring system. At about 11:57 the CPU utilization goes from 25% to 75%. The…
K Erlandsson
  • 635
  • 1
  • 9
  • 13
11
votes
3 answers

High load average, low cpu

My server has slowed down, and I don't know why. Print from top: top - 14:32:50 up 639 days, 6:30, 1 user, load average: 67.93, 70.63, 79.85 Tasks: 245 total, 1 running, 244 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 3.9% us, 0.5% sy, 0.0%…
Kamilos
  • 225
  • 1
  • 3
  • 9
9
votes
5 answers

High load due to I/O wait in Ubuntu 12.04 on EC2 instance

I am using Ubuntu server 12.04 , having trouble finding cause of load, I have seen change in response time of server from past week after reading Linux Troubleshooting, Part I: High Load It seems like there is no issue with CPU and RAM, and this…
7
votes
1 answer

High load average but low CPU usage and disk I/O

I’m encountering a strange issue on one of my servers. This is on a KVM VPS which has one dedicated CPU core. Sometimes the load spikes to around 2.0: However, CPU usage doesn’t actually increase during that period, which also rules out iowait…
Daniel Lo Nigro
  • 424
  • 6
  • 10
7
votes
4 answers

What is causing the unusual high load average?

I noticed on Tuesday night of last week, the load average went up sharply and it seemed abnormal since the traffic is small. Usually, the numbers usually average around .40 or lower and my server stuff (mysql, php and apache) are optimized. I…
James
  • 71
  • 1
  • 1
  • 4
6
votes
3 answers

CPU overloaded but no proccess is using more than 1%

I am monitoring a Cpanel (centos) server which have a 2-core CPU (4 virtual CPU cores) and it seems to be overloaded because I got this values using top: load average: 11.80, 13.30, 13.02 Cpu(s): 42.2%us, 11.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 35.6%id, 10.1%wa, 0.1%hi,…
Pablo
  • 99
  • 1
  • 3
5
votes
4 answers

Load average 3.00 on mostly idle server

I have a VPS hosting a small web app (apache, php-fpm, mysql) that's mostly idle for now as the traffic is quite low. Surprisingly, the load average is always >= 3.00: # uptime 02:20:00 up 69 days, 6:03, 1 user, load average: 3,04, 3,04,…
BenMorel
  • 4,215
  • 10
  • 53
  • 81
5
votes
2 answers

How can I chose a max load threshold depending on the number of available cores?

I have a pipeline that runs some computationally intensive tasks on a Linux machine. The script that launches these checks the current load average and—if it is above a certain threshold— waits until the load falls below it. This is on an Ubuntu…
terdon
  • 157
  • 1
  • 11
4
votes
1 answer

ATOP: vmcom / vmlim -> SWP is red

in ATOP I'm getting a red alert like this: vmcom 76.3G | vmlim 49.8G This is a value that is attached to the "SWP" (so "SWAP" is meant?)-line. What does this mean and what can I do against it?
MyFault
  • 893
  • 3
  • 14
  • 35
4
votes
1 answer

CPU 100% idle but still showing load average

I have a Blade Server with CentOS 6.4. On idle state it shows a constant load average of more than 1. However I prepared another machine having the same hardware and CentOS version and its load average is staying around 0 when it is idle. The output…
haroon_aut
  • 41
  • 1
  • 3
4
votes
2 answers

High Server Load cannot figure out why

My server is currently running CentOS 5.2, with WHM 11.34. Currently, we're at 6.43 to 12 for a load average. The sites that we're hosting are taking a lot time to respond and resolve. top doesn't show anything out of the ordinary and iftop…
Tango Bravo
  • 143
  • 5
4
votes
2 answers

0% CPU in top for all processes, but load average > 1

On two different servers (with Ubuntu 12.04LTS AMD64) I have seen the following behaviour: op - 10:50:05 up 305 days, 21:17, 1 user, load average: 1.94, 2.52, 2.97 Tasks: 141 total, 2 running, 139 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s):…
fadedbee
  • 1,988
  • 4
  • 22
  • 33
4
votes
4 answers

Explain load averages on Solaris 10

I understand load averages on Linux, but am a bit mystified by the load averages on a legacy Solaris 10 machine my app runs on. The load averages seem impossibly high. Here's the output. [netcool1 (root)/]$ uptime 11:49am up 580 day(s), 10:51, …
coding_hero
  • 221
  • 3
  • 5
  • 11
4
votes
2 answers

Load average at 1, even though I've stopped all services!

I have a virtual server running Debian 5 where any action is very slow (like password verification when logging in via SSH or doing su). I checked the load average, which is hovering around 1-2. Then I stopped all services (apache, mysql, postfix,…
Aron
  • 189
  • 7
1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8