I'm new to managing servers, and I've run into something that's stumped me. I received a warning from my VPS provider informing me that my load usage was very high. I hadn't run into this problem before, so I attempted to look into it. Unfortunately I haven't been able to figure out why this is the case after quite a bit of research.
The server is, I believe, OpenVZ, with plenty of RAM to spare (2 GB) and a decent processor with a SSD. I've shut down nearly every process that I could imagine that might be an issue besides apache. I've inspected my top/htop output very carefully and I can't detect anything unusual. But notice the load average. It should be around 0 with this level of CPU usage, right?
I was wondering if it was maybe something to do with disk usage, but since this is OpenVZ apparently I can't use a tool like atop to determine more information about disk activity.
How can I debug this further? Thanks!
Best Answer
As you're in a VPS environment:
Did you ever consider that the load is coming from the host? Maybe you have only 2 virtual CPU cores assigned and the host system is overcommitted or completely exhausted. Therefore your load is rising because any small request is taking a long time. This would explain the sluggish behaviour.
You should talk to your VPS Provider about this.