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Server Load Monitor

We have launched the "Server load Monitor" you see on your Server Panel.
I would try to explain you How to determine the health of your server's computing resources(CPUs) accurately just by looking at the server load monitor.

Do not confuse Server Load monitor with Server Health monitor. Server Health monitor has overall CPU, Memory and Disk usage information.
However, Server Load Monitor only provides you information about your CPUs, but highly accurately.

The example you see below is one of the server in ServerAvatar's network.
Based on what I see on this chart, I can say the following things about the server even without knowing what kind of site it hosts.

It is a very stable server. Meaning, The application hosted on this server is very stable and well developed. The application hosted on this server is still running smoothly. But, It needs an upgrade as soon as possible. Recently there were some traffic spikes or other updates going on. You can see some spikes in the server load monitor too.

If you can see the same thing in the chart, That's awesome! If you don't know what's going on, Let me explain.

Server Load Monitor contains 4 series. They are:

  1. 1 Minute load average (Blue series)
  2. 5 Minutes load average (Red series)
  3. 15 Minutes load average (Orange series)
  4. Cores (Green series)

The "Cores" series shows the number of cores your server has at a specific time. The following server has 6 cores, and there were no upgrades performed recently, so that series has no change.

The "Load Average" is the average work all of your vCPUs had to do in a specific time. It is a number, like 0.16, 3,45, 76,67 or any other number.

And there is a basic threshold. The server load should not go any higher than specific threshold depending on your application and server itself, otherwise your application will slow down. For example, If you have a server with 10 vCPUs and the Load average of any specific time frame is 11, It is still fine. But if it goes any higher than 13-15 (Depending on your application), your server will slow down.

In the following screenshot, You can see there are many spikes above 6 as a threshold. To understand this, Let's understand the importance of 1 minute, 5 minutes and 15 minute load averages.

If 1 minute load average goes higher than 150-200%, It is fine IF it returns back under the threshold. Otherwise, The 5 minutes load average will also start rising.

If 5 minute load average goes higher than 130-140% and it stays there for any longer than 5-10 minutes, You have a huge spike and huge requirement of computing power than you currently have. And it will also cause 15 minutes load average to rise.

If 15 minutes load average goes higher than 110% of the threshold, Your application starts slowing down. In the following screenshot, 15 minute load average (orange) stays exactly or around threshold. It means that the site is sometimes slow but the difference is negligible.

That is why, the application(s) on following server is working just fine right now. But if it gets a huge flow of visitors, the site will slow down with the current configuration, Sooner or later, the owner of this application has to upgrade the server. Right now, the owner of this server is getting 100% return on money constantly for the server :v .

Memory also affects server load. If your server lacks memory, your server will start swapping data from memory to swap and from swap to memory and it would require computing power on your server. So, make sure your server is not swapping (We will add swap memory usage on dashboard).