If you have a reseller hosting account, WebHost Manager prominently displays system load average information at the top of the page:
cPanel does not display load average information. However, you can view load averages at any time on a server by typing the following command at the command prompt:
uptime
Here is sample output from the uptime command:
username@a2server [~]# uptime 21:19:12 up 388 days, 17:32, 0 users, load average: 5.15, 5.78, 6.58
Interpreting system load averages
So what do the numbers in load averages represent? Let's look again at the sample output from the uptime command in the previous section:
load average: 5.15, 5.78, 6.58
The three numbers are, from left to right, the system load averages for the past one, five, and fifteen minutes. In this case, system load has been slightly decreasing over the past 15 minutes.
The numbers themselves represent the number of processes waiting to use the CPU (or multiple CPU cores) on the computer. A completely idle computer, for example, would have a load average of 0.
