Load Average of 300, low or high?

[manny2008]

Is this Load Average 309.81, 300.60, 273.82 low, average or high?

 

[dannygoh]

is way too highhhh and wondering how it survive

 

[sullise]

Ahh...I'd say about 308-309 too high..LOL.

What you running? PII's with 2000 sites? HAHA.

 

[koh]

how did you manage that load and still running fine?

 

[manny2008]

Well I just found out after having server problems with websites not responding.

How can I find out what was/is causing this load?

 

[jmstacey]

Top will help a little, at least pointing out the particular service, possible the user if you give them ssh access.

 

[manny2008]

Jon I will PM you

 

[manny2008]

Is a Load Average 0.25 equal to 25%?

 

[decafranky]

Is a Load Average 0.25 equal to 25%?

yeps

 

[nobaloney]

No.

top includes the the output of uptime.

From man uptime

uptime gives a one line display of the following information. The cur-
rent time, how long the system has been running, how many users are
currently logged on, and the system load averages for the past 1, 5,
and 15 minutes.

and from Wikipedia:

An idle computer has a load number of 0. Each process that is using CPU, waiting for CPU or in uninterruptible sleep (usually waiting for disk activity) adds 1 to the load number. The load average is calculated as the exponentially damped moving average of the load number.

Jeff

 

[lacrimos]

edited!edited!edited!edited!edited!

 

[nobaloney]

For HDD? Or What?

I just quoted a wikipedia article; you'd have to ask the author of the article what s/he meant.

I have file hosting services and i get server load every evening. and download speed from my server is little at this moment.
Does it means that HDD-s are very busy and i get server load?

In my experience it's more often a problem with swap memory being used.

I must new add Raid HDD-s to get down server load ?

Probably not; when we're trying to lower server load we generally look first at memory.

Can you you post the output of the first lines of the top command when you're having a server load problem (through the line that begins with Swap: )?

Jeff

 

[lacrimos]

edited!edited!edited!edited!edited!edited!

 

[nobaloney]

3.29 isn't a high load and I don't see anything wrong here.

I'd like to see the same cut-and-paste but with a much higher load.

However, in general, the problem is often related to not having enough memory.

Jeff

 

[lacrimos]

edited!edited!edited!edited!edited!edited!edited!edited!

 

[nobaloney]

47MB of used swap memory is where we generally start seeing problems.

However I see only load average of 9.48 (generally you may begin to see problems at that number) is nowhere near the 300 user load mentioned in this thread.

Try restarting httpd, mysqld, and exim, and see if the amount of used swap memory goes down. And if so, if that helps. If so, then yes, more memory will help.

Jeff

 

[lacrimos]

edited!edited!edited!edited!edited!edited!edited!

 

[jaapvstr]

A server can run till a max load of 9? It will respond slow then won't it?

 

[lacrimos]

edited!edited!edited!edited!edited!

 

[nobaloney]

A server load of 9 may or may not mean slower response time.

You can try it and see.

In general it's bad if your server uses more than a small amount of swap memory.

Because swap memory isn't memory. It's space on your drive.

And it's much slower than real memory.

But ...

If the swap memory is being used by a program that's not running much, it won't slow it down that often.

Jeff