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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Sounds about right by KnightStalker · 2001-11-14 13:02 · Score: 5, Informative

The load average represents the number of processes waiting in the run queue over the last x amount of time. I think the three numbers reported in "uptime" are the last minute, five minutes, and ten minutes, but I could be wrong. It sounds like yours is fairly low, because you have more than one processor (a load average of 2 or more would be 100% usage for a dual proc machine, at least on Solaris).

The Solaris server where I work has 16 processors and the load average usually sits around 10-15. I'd be worried if my single-proc linux workstation had that high of an average, though... :-)

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* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."