Load average sar top

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Hi,
For a 32 core CPU, and having following outputs for TOP and sar -q, How can I decide that my system is healthy or over loaded ?
I am looking from perspective of load average. What readings can be considered as healthy/worrying?

sar -q

10:00:01 AM runq-sz plist-sz ldavg-1 ldavg-5 ldavg-15
10:10:01 AM 16 3354 9.58 7.32 8.29

Top command

top - 14:00:00 up 16 days, 14:00, 1 user, load average: 7.43, 7.27, 7.23

Thanks,

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Responses

Jamie Bainbridge's picture Red Hat Guru 7252 points
1 October 2015 10:51 AM

If the load average is greater than the number of CPUs, the system is overwhelmed.

For a 32-core system, a load average of 9 is no problem. If the load average consistently stays over 32, then there is cause for concern.

ad Community Member 20 points
1 October 2015 11:01 AM

Thanks Jamie for quick reply.
Can we refer any one of these 2 commands (top or sar -q) to refer to load average values?
At a given point of time both should show same values, isn't it?

jb Active Contributor 245 points
1 October 2015 11:39 AM

You can refer to any of these commands, they report the same values.

  • "top" is real time
  • "sar -q" reads results of a cronjob scheduled to collect different system metrics every 10 minutes (default)
Marc Milgram's picture Red Hat Expert 1164 points
1 October 2015 1:42 PM

If you only care about current load average, uptime provides load average, but otherwise fewer details than top.

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