I'm new to Linux and I've noticed that my server's system load is consistently around 150%. I'm not sure if this is normal behavior or if I should be concerned. Here's a screenshot of my server status: [link to image]. Can anyone help me understand whether this is typical for server performance?
4 Answers
A load average of 1.00 on a single-core CPU means your CPU is fully utilized. For multi-core systems, the load should equal the number of cores to show full usage. If you're on a quad-core, then a load average of 4.00 means it's maxed out. If you're consistently at 150% load, that suggests you're utilizing around 1.5 cores, which might be okay depending on your server's requirements. Just keep an eye on it—if it gets to 300%, you might need to consider upgrading your setup!
Your setup sounds pretty busy; if you're running MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, Docker, Grafana, and Traefik all at once, that's quite a lot to handle. You might want to consider simplifying or distributing some of those services to different servers to reduce the load.
I see you mentioning it's 85% idle sometimes, which isn’t too concerning. But it can fluctuate based on what processes are running at the time.
Have you checked other monitoring tools like `top`? They can give you a clearer picture of what's really going on with your CPU usage.
Here's a screenshot from the `top` command I ran: [screenshot link]. What do you think?
Yeah, I'm realizing that 150% translates to 1.5 CPU cores. I didn't expect that for idle time. I'm digging into my database configurations to optimize things and I've already managed to bring it down to 50%!