Ever wondered if your server is overloaded? Its a common practice for System Engineers to run the top command and see which process is consuming the most CPU and Memory. However, with virtualisation and servers with multiple processors, this statistic becomes less relevant.
CPU just reflects the amount of time which a process is hogging a single processor. If the server is meant to only run that process, the server is pretty fine having a very high CPU load for that process. In fact, with a low CPU load, the server is probably under utilized.
The really important statistics we should look at is load average. This shows the number of processors waiting for CPU time. This is a very good indication of CPU overloading.
If your server is a one processor server and load average shows 1, it means that your server is optimally used. Increasing the number of processors will have little effect. Alternatively, if you start having load averages of 3 and above, maybe its time to increase the number of processors for this particular vitalized server…
Just did a check.. and apparently, our servers are running good on 8 Mar -12:36am.
