¿When should I worry about High CPU?
Hi there.
I'm using a dedicated CPU instance for an e-learning platform. It's a 4CPU server and in the last 30 minutes it reached 15 points of load.
Is it too much for this server? Should I be worried?
Regards.
1 Reply
mjones
Linode Staff
Hello! A load of 15 on a server with 4 CPUs is quite a bit. Generally, servers can handle as much load as they have CPU threads, so for 4 CPUs you would want your day-to-day load to be under 4.
I'd recommend taking a look with top to see which services are using the most CPU time. We have a guide on top here:
Using top to Monitor Server Performance
Keep in mind that some services may use multiple child processes that only take up a portion of resources, but collectively they use quite a bit overall.
Once you've found the process that's using the resources, I'd recommend either restarting the service or rebooting your Linode. From there, monitor to see if the overall load gets to the same place as it was before. If it doesn't, then there's nothing to worry about. If it does, look into how the service can be optimized for better performance. If you're confident that you've optimized the service as much as possible, it may be time to upgrade your Linode to the next largest size.