Understanding load average

Another very important topic to understand when monitoring performance is load average, which is a series of numbers that represents your server’s trend in CPU utilization over a given time. You’ve probably already seen these series of numbers before, as there are several places in which the load average appears. If you run the htop utility, for example, the load average is shown on the screen. In addition, if you execute the uptime command, you can see the load average in the output of that command as well. You can also view your load average by viewing the text file that stores it in the first place:

cat /proc/loadavg

Personally, I habitually use the uptime command in order to view the load average. The primary purpose of the uptime command is to display the amount of time that the server has been in use, and this time resets anytime you power off or reboot the server. But in addition to how long the server has been powered on, the...