Load Averages
 

I am so fresh when it comes to linux administration. Anyways, what do you keep your load averages at before getting a new server?

You know how we know you're a big loser?

around 2 teaspoons I avg each time I shoot a load

anymore idiots?

I just dumped a big steaming load

common, it's gfy, anymore clowns?

Depends on how many CPU you have. But we keep our load averages around .30 and let it peek to 4.0 on quad core servers.

The site is usually the issue not the server, if you are using too much load then tweak your site run smoother. We have site that gets over a mil hits a month on a p4.

.5 load maybe less

the load is not just cpu, its an average based on cpu, ram, hdd load (not amount of storage being used).

so it can be any number and server is still ok.
you need to figure it out by checking cpu usage, ram usage (and if theres swap usage) and current read/write load on the hdd

that makes sense to me, thank you.

Thanks for everyone else responded maturely.

Here is my output

sar -q

Average: 5 85 1.02 1.17 1.18

Considering it's on VPS with not even dedicated single core, the load average is above what it should be.

VPS is presumably much of the reason.

Regardless of the marketing claims, a VPS is going to be far more limiting than a dedicated server. Nothing against VPS per se, but load limitations / uneven loads is going to be issue when sharing a traditional VPS server.

Amazon's EC2, while similar in some aspects to a VPS, is structured differently and hence may be a better solution, in particular, for larger sites that want to be able to smoothly scale up and down in responses to loads. With that said, that's likely overkill for what you're seeking, but anyways, for more details see http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

First thing to do is find out what the process, CPU load, memory limits, etc are for your VPS service (details likely buried in the TOS / welcome email) - you may be able to make simple changes to reduce the load.

Also, many VPS services, especially for new customers, will assist in finding out what is causing the higher load and, especially if it's due to other users / server overloading, will offer to move the account to a less loaded and/or more powerful VPS server.

And finally, if anticipating much growth, price out dedicated servers - if you're handy with server administration, that will greatly reduce the cost. Otherwise, go with managed - costs a lot more, but far less problems, and better support.

Hope this helps.

Ron

Thanks for your nice reply. A VPS is limited compared to dedicated solution. Interesting you mention amazon because I've been reading their website about the various web services they're offering and I'm planning on using their CDN once I reach a certain point. I've asked my hosting to upgrade my VPS on a week trial so I can have my sites run smoothly while I figure out a better solution. Taking a closer look at my processes I'm getting a lot of apache requests and mySQL is taking a huge amount of processing. For what I'm doing, this makes complete sense. I've been avoiding a dedicated because I like to keep my overhead at a minimum. I defiantly need a managed solution. :)