As we learned in our article, What is Server Load? there are multiple reasons why you may be experiencing high server load and things you can do to help alleviate the issues. In this article, we will look at the four most common ways of looking at and analyzing server load. Let’s take a look at them:

Option 1:

Run the command:

cat /proc/loadavg

The output should look like this:

root@localhost:~]# cat /proc/loadavg
0.18 0.28 0.30 2/527 4237
root@localhost:~]#

Option 2:

Run the command:

The output will look like this:

[root@localhost:~]# w
09:07:09 up 8:18, 2 users, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
root tty1 – 00:52 10:52 0.13s 0.13s -bash
root pts/0 192.168.122.1 01:01 0.00s 0.34s 0.00s w
[root@localhost:~]#

More on the w command:

The w command is also good for seeing the users logged into your server. It will list their IP addresses and how long they’ve been logged in.

Option 3:

Run the command:

uptime

The output should look like this:

[root@localhost ~]# uptime
09:08:57 up 8:20, 2 users, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
[root@localhost ~]#

Option 4:

Run the command:

top

This will provide you a listing of the processes running and the time it’s taking to do so. It should look like this:

[root@localhost ~]# top
top – 09:10:32 up 8:21, 2 users, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
Tasks: 93 total, 2 running, 91 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.3%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.3%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 1030908k total, 934772k used, 96136k free, 76852k buffers
Swap: 2064376k total, 0k used, 2064376k free, 711632k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2232 root 20 0 2672 1080 856 R 0.7 0.1 0:00.10 top
1377 nrpe 20 0 5972 1076 688 S 0.3 0.1 0:03.56 nrpe
1649 root 20 0 12476 3460 2708 S 0.3 0.3 0:03.28 sshd
1 root 20 0 2872 1372 1168 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.73 init
2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd

As with many Linux commands, you can run the command man top to access the manual pages for the top command.

Run the command: