Acceptable Server Load Average

[RaZor Edge]

I known that an acceptable Server Load Average very much depends on a number of factors.

From what I've read:

• For 1 CPU: less than 1.00 is considered 'optimal'.
• For 2 CPUs: less than 2.00 is considered 'optimal'.

In my cpanel, my business plan show 4 cpus. So, is it ok to say that a server load below 4 is great?

My usual seems to be 0.30/0.60, can I consider it excellent?

[Andre]

Understanding what the server load is and how it works exactly is very complicated. It's also not really possible to say what's optimal, it depends on a lot of things. Basically you can see the server load as a sort of process-waiting queue. The more processes that are waiting to be processed, the higher the load. That's not all there's to it, but that's basically how you can look at it.

It's not as if there's a specific point at which there's a noticable difference in performance. It also highly depends on what kind of CPUs are being used. So in other words, it's not really possible to say whether or not your VPS is going to perform great when it has a load over 4. I've seen some of our VPS's with a load of over 10 (when a client was running a very heavy mysql query) and it was still operating without any problem at all.

As for the load you are mentioning (0.30/0.60): you can indeed consider that an excellent load.

Sorry if the explanation is a bit vague, it's a tough subject to explain