Hey guys,

I was wondering, what is the acceptable load averages for a dual and quad processor Redhat 7.2 server?

In single processor, a load average of under 1 is always good.
Does that mean if you have dual cpus? the load average is good under 2?


Thanks

I used to help monitoring a dual cpu. That machine got DDoS attacks that the load average reached 100+.

Anyway, the server worked fine at a load average of 6 or below.

I'm not sure what is the recommended though.

We have been on a dual and all worked fine up until around the 5 or 6 mark, now we use singles but with far less sites and generally they are around the 0.05 - 0.1 mark, which works just great :)

For a dual CPU (PIII) loads of about 5 are acceptable as websites come up without problem but above it they become very slow.

For a single CPU WHM say 1.0 is good but we havent had problem for loads of arround 2.5

Mac

In a way you're right.. load < #proc is best.

Basically the load average is dependent on the process queue length. That is the number of processes waiting on the processor to run - this is different than the list of processes itself. On a xMP machine the next process switch that occurs the queue will go down by the number of processes (but if the running aren't done they go back).

So a dual processing box, you shouldn't see any problem with a load up to 2. In the real world, it can go higher without problem - usually. It is dependent on the types of processes you're running. On a web server I would think you could get to 5,6 maybe even 8 at the extreme. Past that you're gonna see slow downs.

I've seen loads of 12-14 on a single RISC box and it was still usable. It wasn't fast but it you could get what you needed to do done. But most tasks came in via terminals at 9.6kbps so it so it never was quick to begin with.