Charting server load

[William O'Higgins Witteman]

On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 11:38:25AM -0500, Alex Beamish wrote:
>   The two tools that come to mind are top and xload. You probably have top,
>   but xload is an X11 graphical tool that you may not be able to run.

I've been looking at top, but I note that it is pretty CPU intensive,
and I'm trying to lower the load as much as I can :-P

>   The load average is how many processes are ready to run at any given time.
>   Depending on the hardware configuration, the limits to speed may be the
>   hard drive sub-system, the amount of swap, the network or the processor
>   throughput.
>
>   For example, I have two types of CPU in my grid engine -- one is a 1GHz
>   machine with 1/2G RAM, and the other is a beefier processor (2.5GHz
>   perhaps) with 2G RAM. Some jobs that take 3-4 hours on the first class
>   machine take about 10 minutes on the second class of machine, strictly
>   because the swap is used less because there's more RAM.
>
>   And I can see that by running top -- kswapd is taking 30-50% of the CPU,
>   the task itself is getting about .1% of the CPU, and the rest is idle
>   time, waiting for the hard drive subsystem. That's a situation where more
>   RAM would help; unfortunately these motherboards are maxed out.

That's quite helpful, thank you.  All of the machines that I run have
loads under 1, and so I have little experience with this type of thing.

>   You probably need to contact your web provider and ask them when the new
>   boxes are being rolled out to lower the load. And if they're not being
>   rolled out, think about finding a new web provider. (I can highly
>   recommend [1]pair.com -- FreeBSD servers, a great network and great
>   customer service.)

I appreciate the advice - I'll contact the provider.  As for pair, they
are technically sound as you suggest, but because they are a US company
I am uncomfortable with them legislatively.
-- 

yours,

William

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