In this article we’ll discuss what a load average on your server is, and how you can monitor this number on your VPS (Managed Virtual Private Server) or dedicated server hosting package.
If you are using shared-hosting this level of account usage detail isn’t available to the end-user, and you’d want to contact our system administration department if you’re curious about your account’s individual resource usage.
Once you understand your server’s load average a bit more you’ll probably also be interested in advanced server load monitoring, for an even more in-depth look at your resource usage.
Monitoring load in WHM
Your VPS or dedicated server comes with something called WHM (Web Host Manager). This application is what runs on top of cPanel, and with it you can control more server-wide aspects of your server. While cPanel is mainly for controlling user-level or site specific settings for the accounts you are hosting.
Logging in
You can always access WHM with one of the following URL structures:
https://vpsXXXX.inmotionhosting.com/whm
https://dedXXXX.inmotionhosting.com/whm
https://example.com/whm
You might receive an SSL certificate warning trying to access WHM. This is typically just letting you know that the SSL certificate is self-signed, and you can decide to go ahead and proceed anyway, or add the SSL certificate to your exception list so that you aren’t prompted in the future about it.
Looking at load averages
Once you’ve logged in, up at the top-right hand corner of the page you should see your load averages displayed as three numbers. These numbers are setup as follows:
Load Averages: 1.00 2.00 3.00
1.00 – 1 Minute average
2.00 – 5 Minute average
3.00 – 15 Minute average
In the example above, these load averages would indicate that 15 minutes ago the server was averaging a load of 3.00, while 5 minutes ago it was averaging a load of 2.00, and over the last minute it’s been averaging a load of 1.00. This means that over the course of 15 minutes the server was doing a lot of work, 5 minutes ago it cut that workload in half, and then within the last minute it was cut in half again.
The Linux load average on a server is a rough estimate of the workload currently waiting to process. This can be thought of much in the same way of a highway dealing with the traffic from cars and other vehicles on the road. If you for instance had a 2-lane highway, then you could fill up both lanes with traffic and there would be no delays for any of the vehicles trying to get to their destination.
However if you had an entire extra lane of traffic waiting to get onto the highway, because currently both available lanes are already full. You’d want some sort of way to estimate just how backed up your highway is, so that you can either warn people of delays or think about expanding the highway.
In the case of our highway example seeing an average road load of 3.00, lets us easily see that on average there is a full extra lane of vehicles waiting to use the road and causing delays.
If we see this high average consistently, it might be time to start expanding our highway or letting commuters know that they can expect delays. The same scenario can play out on your server as well, so you can use your server’s load average to determine when things are overloaded and upgrades might be necessary.
Acceptable load averages for VPS hosting
The acceptable load average on your VPS is dependent upon the type of server it is. If you’re on a 12GB VPS, this means you have 12 vCPU cores available to use as resources require. Your load threshold is 12 and below. The same calculations apply to 4, 8 and 16GB packages as well.
Acceptable load averages for dedicated server hosting
Depending on the level of dedicated server you might have, you could have 2, 4, or even 8 CPUs or lanes to fill up with traffic. If you’re consistently running a load average higher than the amount of CPUs that your server has you could be causing your site’s visitors to experience delays.
You would want to look into optimizing your site’s resource usage to bring it back to safe levels for your current tier of dedicated server, or start to think about possibly upgrading to a more powerful dedicated server to handle your demand.
Below you can see the number of CPU cores with our various dedicated server packages:
2 – Essential
4 – Advanced
8 – Elite
