Server Load and Top

[buabco]

Hello,

This is going to be kind of a newbie question but I'm a bit puzzled.

I've used WHM Service Status to monitor the server load, and it's allways arround 1 or 2, it even got to 2.5 (Wierd if I got one processor).

So I got worried and used the TOP command on shell to see who was taking all the CPU... and SURPRISE, the CPU was more than 80% idle...

On the other hand Service Status sais I'm using up about 30% of memory and TOP says almos 90%, so my question is simple...

What is WHM actually measuring?

[neonix]

I think WHM does not consider buffered memory in its calculations and hence the lower percentage.

[chirpy]

The information that WHM shows is relatively meaningless. Top is a better guage. You need to do some searching to understand how linux calculates load averages and memory usage to get a better feeling for how the server is performing. A good example is memory usage - a well running Linux server should be using upwards of 90% of its memory because it should be caching frequently requested pages. It should not, however, be using much swapfile space.

[FractalizeR]

For example, for explaining what Server load is you can look here: http://hostlibrary.com/ServerLoadTheBasicsiuuyt76.html

[Krisiun]

For more complete information about server load:

http://www.luv.asn.au/overheads/NJG_...luvSlides.html

Regards.