Checking system load

If the demands being placed on a running program cause it to request excessive resources from your server this can lead to poor performance and system instability.

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Uptime

First let’s check the load on your server using the uptime command.

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$ uptime

15:16:45 up 41 days, 2:35, 2 users, load average: 0.01, 3.01, 2.70

cs

The example shows the output from uptime. When the command was run at 15:16:45 the server had been up for 41 days 2 hours and 35 minutes, there were two users logged on and the load averages were 0.01, 3.01 and 2.70.

The load average represents the work being done by the system. The three numbers show the load averages for the last minute, 5 minutes and 15 minutes, respectively. A load average of 1 reflects the full workload of a single processor on the system. A load of 2 on a system with two CPUs means that those CPUs were working at maximum. On a system with four CPUs, that 2 reflects a workload using about half of the available processing power.

Under normal circumstances you’ll want the load average to be 70% of your total CPU usage or less. You can check the number of CPUs available to your instance by running the following command:

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cs

If the load averages show that the load is increasing and is above the number of CPUs, you should look into the cause of the high load. A load above the number of CPUs means that the system is having to queue up processor requests, which reduces performance.

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top

The top command displays real time information regarding the server’s resource usage. Take a look at our guide for a more in-depth look at using this tool. The first few lines will give you a summary of the resource utilisation on your system and you can sort the list of processes by CPU (P) or memory (M) use which allows you to quickly see where your server is receiving the biggest demands on its resources.

vmstat

The amount of memory a system has is one of the most common restraining factors. The swap is an area of the hard drive where data is moved to free up physical memory (RAM) for a process to use (not all servers have swap space configured). A system using its swap area does not necessarily mean it is low on memory, but if most of your system’s swap is being consumed it could indicate that your server is trying to do more than its available memory permits.

If swap space is configured and you suspect your server is running out of standard memory, you can use vmstat to show how much swapping is occurring.

The following example displays a system’s virtual memory statistics 10 times at 5 second intervals.

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$ vmstat 5 10

procs ———–memory————- —swap—- —–io—- –system– —–cpu——

r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa st

2 3 138096 3904 140 584 14829 33632 16684 33633 1353 11562 64 9 16 11 0

7 4 156592 3800 132 492 53570 48618 54264 48622 2762 8148 20 5 50 24 0

2 7 258552 3040 128 668 37910 39822 39766 39826 2763 10861 43 8 23 26 0

7 4 261608 4312 116 776 41696 30854 42171 30855 2771 8631 26 6 33 35 0

3 4 259316 3824 112 576 44616 32316 44697 32320 2746 7087 15 4 52 28 0

0 5 257000 3376 116 880 25895 19847 26622 19848 1673 2877 1 2 68 29 0

4 4 263240 3384 124 1424 30018 21066 30497 21070 1732 4559 9 3 64 24 0

2 14 264656 5740 120 1812 27685 19030 28029 19031 2194 5345 11 3 51 35 0

6 3 338044 3764 132 1568 20087 31066 20470 31070 1798 9847 46 6 33 14 0

2 4 325904 4048 108 1172 13251 7190 13812 7190 1193 8838 38 5 24 32 0

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In the example the free column shows that the amount of free memory is only around 4MB.

The si and so columns show the amount of data being transferred between the system’s swap and its memory. In this example you can see there is lots of data being moved. so is the amount of data being moved to the swap to free up memory. si is the amount of data being pulled from the swap back in to memory. This happens when the data is required for a process to run.

When a server is constantly swapping into and out of memory it is an indication that the load it is being placed under is too great for the resources it has available. top can be used to help identify the processes that are consuming the most resources.

Summary

If top and vmstat indicate that the server is using all its resources you need to look at optimising your current set up – this can include running any processing jobs outside peak hours, killing any processes no longer required and reconfiguring processes so they require less resources. You may also want to consider increasing the size of your server to better match your requirements.

Assuming your application is running and looks healthy, let’s now check that it is listening for network connections. We can see if the service is listening on the correct socket using the netstat command, which we’ll cover in the next article in this series.

출처 : http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/checking-system-load- on-linux