What Are Typical Load Averages for Servers?

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @12:37PM from the deciphering-the-numbers dept.

Jon Hill asks: "I'm curious to figure out how to guage the performance of my servers and know at what level of usage I should think about hardware upgrades. 90% of our servers run Linux and various services standard to Linux such as sendmail, samba, DNS, etc. One of our main servers (router/firewall/sendmail/spop) has been running with a load average of .5 to 1.5 regularly. It supports 200 users and is an SMP Intel machine with 2GB of RAM. I'm not sure if it needs software/kernel tweaking or hardware modifications and I can't seem to find any reference information. Suggestions?"

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General recommendation... by larien · 2001-11-15 09:37 · Score: 3, Insightful

As a general recommendation I heard once, your load average shouldn't get more that 2xnumber of CPUs. i.e. on a single CPU box, it shouldn't get higher than 2, for a 64-CPU high-powered server, it shouldn't get above 128.
I've found it a reasonably good guide to when there's an issue on Solaris boxes; I think linux uses similar numbers to calculate run queue averages, but other OS's (eg, IRIX) use different formulas to calcualte it so you might need to tweak this recommendation.