I've got a CentOS 7 VM which seems to be stuck with quite high load (8-10). CPU usage is around 25%, there is no IO wait and there are no processes marked as D in top. I've been looking around as much as I can but these seem to be the only three causes of high load that I can find. Does anybody else know what else could be causing high load? I'm stumped!
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Why do you believe that the load is high? – Michael Hampton Jul 23 '20 at 18:16
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I ran pretty much the same set up on a CentOS 6 OpenVZ container and the load was around 2.5. I was surprised to see it jump to 8 on a Hetzner Cloud VM running CentOS 7. – Ben Jones Jul 23 '20 at 18:22
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I think those numbers are quite normal. Your CPU usage is 50%, and not 25% (don't forget the sys load - userprocesses waiting for the kernel to compute something also count as running!) ... Let's take a look at the definition of system load: link
A rough summary would be "the average number of running processes (non-idle) over time". From your top statistik, I see quite a lot of processes having a cpu load over 1%, so it is quite normal, that your system load is high.
Take note that the load numbers are not really comparable between two systems: it depends on the sampling frequency etc... So if you recently moved to a different cloud, it is totally normal that those numbers differ!
here is quite a good explanation why these numbers aren't really comparable.
Martin
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Thanks for the advice. If it looks okay I'll stop worrying! It does seems to be responsive enough. – Ben Jones Jul 23 '20 at 18:45
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Absolutely okay! The responsiveness is more important than the system load... – Martin Jul 23 '20 at 19:05