Duh, right? Here’s the point, if you have 8 cores then you can have an average CPU load of 8 and that would put you at capacity. That means that your core is at capacity (meaning there is one process running on the core, and nothing queued up waiting for it.) Think of 1 as being 100% capacity, so if you have 2 physical CPU’s and each of them have 4 cores then in grand total you have 8 cores. How many cores does each CPU have? Each core can handle a load average of 1. Good point! Who only has 1 CPU these days? Not me, that’s for sure! So what would be the load average number that would cause 2 CPU’s to be at capacity? It depends. But Cevin, I don’t have 1 CPU, I have 2 CPU’s. 5 that would mean you are at half capacity giving you room for more load. If you have a load average of 1 that would mean you are at capacity and anything more than that would start to queue. Let’s say for example you have 1 CPU with 1 core. This can also be referred to as the run queue length.

For the rest of you, let’s briefly discuss what exactly CPU load average really is.ĬPU load is the number of processes that are using, or want to use, CPU time, or queued up processes ready to use CPU. But what is this CPU load average metric?įor those of you who know all about CPU load average, now is when you might want to skip ahead to the portion of the blog where I give my philosophical opinion about if load average is useful. Who cares though? It’s obvious to me I want to know about CPU percent used because in my mind that tells me how much CPU resources are being utilized. I think everyone knows that if you run the top command you can get the 1 min 5 min and 15 min CPU load average for the box.

In all reality I had a basic understanding of the concept of CPU load on a Linux server, but there were a few things I learned recently and I figured I’d share with the world.

Centos check cpu usage