Understanding Linux system load involves checking the average number of processes waiting for CPU time, and the ‘uptime’ command provides the current time, uptime duration, active users, and three load average values for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes, helping you gauge performance.
Load average measures the average number of processes waiting for CPU over 1, 5, and 15 minutes, differing from CPU utilization; this article explains the concepts, ideal values, illustrative analogies, and practical steps to assess and reduce server CPU load for better performance.
This article explains what Linux swap is, its drawbacks, how to tune the swappiness parameter, methods for monitoring swap usage per system and per process, and practical ways to clear swap, including useful shell scripts and commands.
This guide shows how to use vmstat to pinpoint whether high load averages on a Linux system are caused by CPU saturation, insufficient memory, or slow I/O, by interpreting each column of the vmstat output.
This article explains how to use the sar (System Activity Reporter) tool on Linux to collect and analyze performance data, covering past and real‑time statistics, CPU, memory, I/O and swap metrics, installation steps, and a full list of command‑line options.
