# Why so high load on OpenVZ vps while it has tiny resources?



## ICPH (Aug 28, 2014)

Hello,

at openvz server is running an vps, "vzlist" shows that it has load somewhere at 40.00 and slowly growing.

Im asking why so high wile this VPS has only one CPU core assigned by openvz and only fraction of the openvz server ram?

this VPS ram is exhausted and cpu too thanks to some .php script running on it.

disk io and transaction per seconds looks low... so why strange high?


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## AshleyUK (Aug 28, 2014)

Because it has a low CPU limit the load will increase, a load of 40 "technically" means that the CPU has 40 times the amount of work it can handle real time, however this is also effected by I/O and other server resources.

,Ashley


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## KuJoe (Aug 28, 2014)

If you set the VPS's CPU to 2 instead of one, the load will drop from 40 to 20. It just means that the VPS is processing more than the 1 core it has can process so it's queue up work which is what that load number is.


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## ICPH (Aug 28, 2014)

Thank you, so the load average of the OpenVZ server is not measure of how it is used, while i have a few tiny VPSs which each do lets say 100.00 load, then when OpenVZ server load be 500.00 it might not be an issue, so which value/s an Openvz admin should monitor when load value not? (i mean monitor to prevent openvz server cant keepup with all VPS work)


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## KuJoe (Aug 28, 2014)

Typically load value is a good indicator (if a VPS is hitting 40.00 load then I would be concerned). Personally, we have an automated script that reboots VPSs when they exceed a certain load average as it can impact the rest of the node if that load is due to disk IO.

We have a script that looks at load and CPU usage, here's the command I use to get the CPU usage of an OpenVZ VPS:


/usr/sbin/vzctl exec $vpsid top -bn1 | grep "Cpu(s)" | awk '{print $2}' | cut -d'%' -f1

This will grab the user CPU time percentage from a running OpenVZ container.


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