What Are Typical Load Averages for Servers?

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?"

Comments

Sounds too low

[PD]

If you've got an SMP machine, and your averages are .5 to 1.5, then you've either got too big of a machine for the job, or you should put more stuff on it to utilize it better.

A processor utilized 100% of the time will give you a load average of 1.0. If you've got two processors, you should aim for a load of 2.0 average.

So, good news! You don't have to do any tweaking for performance, unless you have specific issues with the speed of the server. You can probably add more to the server without affecting other processes (unless you've got a lot of I/O going on). You only gave CPU stats, so I am assuming that's what you're concerned about.