You may have seen a load average in Linux. How you find the load average depends on the software you're using. For example, on cPanel systems, you'll find load average in the GUI within WHM in the upper right hand side:

In Virtualmin/Webmin, you'll find the load average on the dashboard:

And on standard Linux systems without a GUI, you can always connect via SSH and issue the uptime command:

You might be wondering, what is the load average and what does it mean? When should you be concerned?

If you look at the screenshot of Virtualmin/Webmin, you can already get the hint about why there are 3 numbers - the first one is an average at 1 minute, the second number is an average at 5 minutes, and the third one is an average at 15 minutes. But what are these numbers? These are percentages. For example, a load average of 0.05 is 5%, 0.80 is 80%, etc. However, most modern systems are multi-core, multi-CPU systems so these percentages work a little differently. If your system only had 1 CPU/1 core, a load of 1.05, or 105%, would be concerning. But it works differently on multi-core systems. For example, if your system has 2 cores and you have a load average of 1.05, this means that the system was only slightly overloaded. 1 process was using 1 core, a second process was using the other core, and a third process was stuck waiting on resources.

As you add cores to your system, load averages start reducing in concern. Using our example, let's use a system with 4 cores. 1.05 load average means 1 process was using 1 core, another process was using 1 core, and a third process was using 5% of a core, leaving 95% of the core idle and another full core idle.

Let's use the cPanel example from above. You might see a 5.03 1 minute average and be concerned. But that server has 32 CPUs. That means only 5 CPU cores out of 32 were fully utilized. If we do some math, 5 is 15.625% of 32. We will round up. 16% utilization is not concerning over 1 minute. Nor is it concerning over 15 minutes. However, things would change greatly if the load was over 20. This would mean the CPUs are 62+% utilized fairly constantly.

If you have concerns about your server's CPU utilization, please open a support ticket or purchase our server management service.