How to check server load

[Jovani]

How do i check server load and what is a good load for a VPS? what is high load, how is the normal load?

I am on a linux server with SSH access and I heard about there are ways to check but don't know how?

I need a guide. Thanks

 

[Hostlumina]

You can check it with some of the following commands

- uptime
It will give you the time the coomand was ran at, the number of days the server has been up + hours & minutes, number of users logged, and the load averages. Note: the load averages given by the command (3 of them) each represents the last minute, 5 minutes, and 15 minutes.

***A load average of 1 reflects a full workload of one processor on the system. So if you have a system with two CPUs with a load of 2, the CPUs were working at max. A system with 4 CPUs and the workload is 2 the system is using half the available processing.

- top
Reference guide: [URLnf=http://linux.about.com/od/commands/l/blcmdl1_top.htm]http://linux.about.com/od/commands/l/blcmdl1_top.htm[/URLnf]

It will display the server resource's usage.

- vmstat
Reference: [URLnf=http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/vmstat8.html]http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/vmstat8.html[/URLnf]
It will give you information on memory, paging, processes, cpu activity, etc...

You want to keep the server load within your available memory and CPU. Just remember that resource usages spike for a short period of time if you have any scheduled processes or there is a spike of visitors at once. If your CPU per example is running at max constantly or long period of time you need to begin looking at optimizing the source (i.e. database) or upgrading.

I always recommend always having a buffer to ensure any spikes for a short or possible long period do not affect any of the performance. This is up to you depending on your budget.

 

[Imbahost-Andy]

The top command is generally used to check memory and cpu usage per process. However it also reports total memory usage and can be used to monitor the total RAM usage.

The free command is the most simple and easy to use command to check memory usage on linux.
$ free -m



The vmstat command with the s option, lays out the memory usage statistics.

$ vmstat -s