I got a Celeron 700Mhz server with 256 MB RAM. Just a quick question: at what point (server load) do the sites really start to become slow?

thanks.

The moment you loaded your Operating System on it ;)

If the load stays above 1 constantly and the % of idle CPU time is low you should consider your box loaded (no more accounts and performance should be fine).

Anything over 1.5 or 2 with no idle CPU time would be overloaded. (Too many accounts and content delivery is crawling.)

th point here about the load in all the day

or on the peak time

I have done a few tests on some of my boxes and have found that sites still load quite fine at loads near 7. However, the hardware specs on our servers are Either Dual P3's, P4's, with 1G Ram. Hard to say how this will translate into your exact server specifications.

I wouldn't use a celeron chip below 1 ghz for hosting a lot of sites... your sites would still load (slowly) with high cpu loads.. but performance will be bad and you are risking crashing your server -- which means downtime.. and that is the main thing you want to avoid. A bad script or an array of issues can cause the cpu load to go way up and that chip will not be able to handle it.

i got a 1.7 celeron and the load reach 10 :) with 256

i was hosting the same sites on a p3 1000 with 512 and the load was from 1 to 2


so i decide to move the biggest site

now i am having 0.30 load

Server load just means how many processes are queued up at any one time ready to be executed by the server.

Compiling somthing I can go well over a 200 server load with 50% CPU usage for both CPU's (Dualie Athlon 1900+ MP)

However, with heavy load, I usually am around a server load of 10 to 15 (apache processes and mysql processes queued), with 80% load... but I'm pushing well over 90Mbit/s at these times.

It really just depends on the server and what you're doing.

My box can handle well over 4 Million dynamic page views per hour without any hickups.