Using these 3 measurements you can get a sense of whether a spike was a short term occurrence or if it’s a prolonged event.

The third and final number is the average load over a 15 minute period. The second decimal is the average load over a 5 minute period. The first decimal represents the average CPU load over the past minute. Under Linux, CPU usage is reported as a series of three decimals like the following result of the ‘uptime’ command: If you’re used to Windows style CPU reporting which shows you a percentage based statistic of utilization, Linux load reporting can be a little confusing. Properly allocating the cores to run the most VM’s efficiently is the goal of any virtualized system. That means your host server can only run as many virtual machines as it has cores (minus 1 for the host server), and usually a VM needs more than 1 core if it’s doing any real work. It’s recommended that your VM CPU allocation match up with a physical CPU core. When you create a new virtual machine, the VM requires at least 1 CPU core to operate. More often it’s the CPU causing resource shortages, especially if you operate a virtualized environment. These days, RAM and storage are cheap and plentiful. CPU load is one of the most important metrics for measuring hardware usage. Under utilization can show you opportunities to use hardware more efficiently. Gradual increases over time can help you predict hardware growth requirements. Unexpected spikes in resource usage can indicate a software or hardware problem. Still, if you’ve reached this point with no solution in sight, you won’t lose anything trying a different one.Monitoring, anticipating, and reacting to server load is a full time job in some organizations. It’s rare for the Linux kernel to be the reason for high CPU utilization. Still, those don’t share the exact feature set and may lack some functionality. Alternatively, you can try open-source versions of your GPU’s drivers. The solution is upgrading or downgrading to a different version. Xorg doesn’t really get along with specific versions of Nvidia’s or AMD’s drivers. Sometimes the GPU’s drivers can cause high CPU usage, too. Sometimes, by enabling compositing support, you’re also enabling many demanding effects. Although officially the compositor offloads CPU-related tasks to the GPU, that’s not always the case.

Save the file, reboot, and hopefully, everything will work okay now.įor Xorg, try disabling your Window Manager’s compositor.

Linux cpu utilization