What is the command to check server load on Linux ?
 

how to check server load ?
im not strong in thechnical stuff

"w" ?

top

ok, i did top

how does this look like ?


last pid: 97308; load averages: 1.93, 4.37, 5.73 up 60+15:55:39 09:53:51
5 processes: 1 running, 4 sleeping
CPU states: 31.3% user, 1.6% nice, 38.3% system, 2.1% interrupt, 26.7% idle
Mem: 1029M Active, 338M Inact, 372M Wired, 82M Cache, 199M Buf, 189M Free
Swap: 256M Total, 1972K Used, 254M Free




good / bad ?

"load averages: 1.93, 4.37, 5.73"

It's coming back down but it was high a couple of minutes ago. Your average is high, too.

its ISprime.

should i contact them ? or is this normal for virtual servers ?

Dark,

first of all, this is freebsd, not linux

then, this is nothing, do not worry about it. Or is the server actually SLOW?

i dont know much about the tech stuff.
i needed to install one script and the guy said that the server was kinda slow.

The load is kinda high, i suggest you contact ISPrime about it.

Try "top -d 1" if you want some more acurate stats (refreshes the window every second instead of every 4 seconds).

Load is the amount of processes that want to run at the same time, this can be a bit higher if the server has multiple processors. You can type uptime to have it displayed. If load is a bit high your PHP/CGI/MySQL will act up for a few seconds from time to time.

uptime is the easiest way to check the load average. Just run "uptime" at the prompt.

The uptime utility displays the current time, the length of time the system has been up, the number of users, and the load average of the system over the last 1, 5, and 15 minutes.

Short spikes are normal, and a good number is anything under 1 (0.8, etc). If it's a script heavy box or a Mysql heavy box, you may see that number consistently stay a bit higher, but if it constantly stays above 10, you have a problem.

Also, uptime is computed based on a couple of things, but mostly on the number of processes in a "wait" state. In other words, the number of processes that are waiting for their chance to run, so this means that if the load average is too high, you have processes that aren't being handled immediately, which translates into a slower server.

You can watch the server performance by running vmstat. For instance, to see 100 1 second snapshots, run "vmstat -c 100". You'll see something like the following

procs memory page disks faults cpu
r b w avm fre flt re pi po fr sr ad0 md0 in sy cs us sy id
26 1 0 558508 38644 319 0 0 0 17 25 0 0 277 19 317 5 5 90

The third column (w) is the processes in the wait state. Ideally, this number should almost always be 0. Do "man vmstat" to see what the rest of the numbers mean. vmstat is a good diagnostics tool to see if your swapping, if your disks are keeping up, etc.

Hope this helps...

bad.

normal

:glugglug

ok, here are the uptime numbers:

[darkjedi@hail]$ uptime
11:12AM up 60 days, 17:14, 1 user, load averages: 1.51, 2.94, 3.85



and here's the vmstat -c 100

[darkjedi@hail]$ vmstat -c 100
procs memory page disks faults cpu
r b w avm fre flt re pi po fr sr da0 da1 in sy cs us sy id
12 7 0 2764880 178384 88 4 3 0 52 34 0 0 333 69 333 24 29 47
13 8 0 2764300 171236 11112 0 0 0 6174 0 122 5 1407 95840 1441 28 51 21
10 7 0 2763804 172716 5799 8 4 0 4305 0 80 58 1383 58278 1012 18 34 48
11 7 0 2767060 170396 6976 0 0 0 3552 0 2 0 1000 44851 594 21 28 51
8 7 0 2767164 170296 5910 0 0 0 3179 0 10 2 1117 87727 435 11 31 58
14 7 0 2767788 169732 6320 5 4 0 3137 0 6 0 1154 102051 732 16 36 48
14 8 0 2783556 169404 5435 0 0 0 2566 0 0 2 1058 88460 1090 17 29 53
22 8 0 2781248 169224 8808 0 1 0 4316 0 6 57 1291 64535 613 18 32 50
8 7 0 2768224 169324 3203 0 0 0 1463 0 11 1 1253 27040 546 11 22 67
^C



how does it look ?

Nothing to worry about... It's good for a shared server..

Yours looks pretty good if you ask me. Here is mine for a dual 2Gig Xeon dedicated server. Mind you this is my busiest server.

12:53pm up 2 days, 18:01, 1 user, load average: 8.36, 6.04, 5.09
300 processes: 294 sleeping, 5 running, 1 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU0 states: 92.0% user, 5.0% system, 0.0% nice, 2.0% idle
CPU1 states: 78.0% user, 18.0% system, 0.0% nice, 3.0% idle
CPU2 states: 92.0% user, 7.0% system, 0.0% nice, 0.0% idle
CPU3 states: 75.0% user, 24.0% system, 0.0% nice, 0.0% idle
Mem: 1030676K av, 1005068K used, 25608K free, 0K shrd, 57096K buff
Swap: 2048276K av, 126900K used, 1921376K free 542264K cached