Hi, The server load option in my host's control panel gives the following output: 2:19am up 141 days, 10:02, 0 users, load average: 34.52, 36.19, 35.24 This has been the scenario for the past few days. I have never seen numbers more than 1 in the last three columns. Do the current numbers indicate that the server is in some amount of load? How big can the numbers be before something bad happens? Ajay.
The load is a measurement of a bunch of different things (CPU, disk I/O, etc.). So *something* is stressing it, but you would need more info to figure out what it is. Could be low on memory and just doing massive virtual memory swapping to disk or something. But 35.00 load averages is up there IMO. I try to keep all my servers under 2.00, although they might peak out at 80.00 or so for a brief second once in awhile. I get a text message to my phone letting me know if any server is higher than 10.00 load for more than 5 minutes, so...
Thanks Shawn for the info. Yeah the server is quite slow to respond as well. I think it is because of the sudden increase in traffic I am getting. I used to get around 500 uniques per day, but traffic has been on the increase during the past few weeks. Stats tell me that I have had 1000+ uniques during the past two hours. Let me check out my options...
If you think it's something from your site, I would look at whatever code you have that is stressing the server, 500 uniques per hour should definitely NOT stress the server if the code is designed properly. The servers I mentioned that run under 2.00 load are serving requests (just one hit per unique user though) to ~1,000 unique users per SECOND. So you definitely have some room for tuning I think.
Whew!!! Finally figured out what was causing the problem. MySQL was using more than 90% of the CPU time. Turned out that my CMS was logging accesses to a MySQL table which had caused the enormous server load. Have turned off stats in my CMS and now my server is getting back to normalcy Thanks Shawn!!!