What does load average mean in Htop?
Load average: The load average represents the average system load over a period of time. 1.0 on a single core cpu represents 100% utilization. Note that loads can exceed 1.0 this just means that processes have to wait longer for the cpu.
What is Virt and RES in top command?
VIRT represents how much memory the program is able to access at the present moment. RES stands for the resident size, which is an accurate representation of how much actual physical memory a process is consuming. (This also corresponds directly to the %MEM column.)
What does the load average of a server mean?
In other words, it is the CPU demand of a server that includes sum of the running and the waiting threads. Typically, the top or the uptime command will provide the load average of your server with output that looks like: These numbers are the averages of the system load over a period of one, five, and 15 minutes.
What should the average load of a CPU be?
If the load average rises to 1.5, the CPU was busy all the time while there was (on average) one other process waiting for 50% of the time, giving the CPU more work than it can handle. The general rule of thumb is that the load average shouldn’t exceed the number of processors in the machine.
Why is it important to know your load average?
Measuring the load average is critical to understanding how your servers are performing; if overloaded, you need to kill or optimize the processes consuming high amounts of resources, or provide more resources to balance the workload. But how do you determine if your server has sufficient load capacity, and when should you be worried?
What does high load average mean in prstat?
When you say ‘High Load average’ I assume you mean that prstat shows for ‘load average’ at the bottom of the output figures of These numbers, look similar to the ones that top provides and probably mean the average queue size of running process.