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How to obtain Linux’s system load average report

17 November 2022 by Luke Reynolds

Obtaining the load average of your server(s) will shed some light on the systemʼs CPU
usage over time. As a Linux system administrator, it is essential to obtain the load
average occasionally, as to determine whether or not your systems are overwhelmed
by trying to handle the current work load. Because of the way load averages are
reported, it is also easy to determine if the server is being overloaded, which may
mean it is time to divide up the work load across load balancing servers, or upgrade
your current hardware.

In this tutorial, we will look at some common command line tools that can be used
to report on the load average of a Linux system. top and uptime are two of the
most popular that come to mind for most administrators, but other tools like vmstat
also allow us to track load average over longer periods of time. We will go over these
various commands and tools below.

In this tutorial you will learn:

• How to use top, htop, uptime, and vmstat commands

• How to see load average for past 1 minute, 5 minutes, and 15 minutes
• How to see load average since last system reboot

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How to obtain Linuxʼs system load average report

So�ware Requirements and Linux Command Line Conventions

Category Requirements, Conventions or So�ware Version Used

System Any Linux distro

So�ware top, htop, uptime, vmstat

Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo

Other
command.

# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root

privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command
Conventions
$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-
privileged user

How to obtain Linux’s system load average report

There are a lot of command line and GUI tools that can report the load average on

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Linux. We have covered some of the most useful methods below. Depending on your
scenario, one tool may work better than another. Check out the examples below and
employ the tools you �nd most useful for monitoring the load on your servers.

top command

The top command gives us a live view of the systemʼs load average in addition to
services running on the system, the amount of system resources each of those
services are using, as well as a summary of the systemʼs CPU utilization, among other
information.

The top command output shows load information and other relevant stats

There are three numbers given for the load average. The numbers are the average
load over 1, 5, and 15 minutes, respectively. Think of these numbers as percentages –
a load of 0.2 means 20%, and a load of 1.00 means 100%.

That should be easy enough to understand, but you may also see load averages
greater than 1.00. This is because load average is not a direct measurement of CPU
usage, but how much “work” (load) your system is trying to process. For example, a

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value of 2.50 means that the current load is 250%, and also indicates that the system
is overloaded by a whopping 150%.

uptime command

The uptime outputs the system load over the last 1 minute, 5 minutes, and 15
minutes at a quick glance. It also outputs some other handy data – the amount of
time since last reboot, the current time, and how many users are logged in.

The uptime command output shows load information and how long since last system reboot

vmstat

The vmstat command also shows CPU load averags, but unlike the previous
commands, it shows load averages since the last server reboot.

$ vmstat

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vmstat shows a breakdown of load averages since the last system reboot

vmstat also accepts arguments:

$ vmstat 10 3
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
0 0 0 187528 177472 855836 0 0 12 78 2 0 7 2 83 1
0 0 0 203996 177532 855848 0 0 0 107 126 208 4 2 89 1
0 0 0 194108 177540 855856 0 0 0 3 102 166 2 1 96 0

The above vmstat command produced 3 reports with 10 seconds delay. Please note
that the �rst line always contains values for entire server uptime.

htop

Another tool worth mentioning would be htop , as many system administrators

prefer it over top since it produces a more discernable looking output that is also
easy on the eyes. It, too, contains load averages for the system over the past 1

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minute, 5 minutes, and 15 minutes:

$ htop

The htop command output shows load information and other relevant stats

You can use the appropriate command below to install htop with your systemʼs
package manager.

To install htop on Ubuntu, Debian, and Linux Mint:

$ sudo apt install htop

To install htop on Fedora, CentOS, AlmaLinux, and Red Hat:

$ sudo dnf install htop

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To install htop on Arch Linux and Manjaro:

$ sudo pacman -S htop

Closing Thoughts

In this tutorial, we saw how to obtain the load averages on a Linux system. There are
a variety of tools that can do the job, including top , htop , uptime , vmstat , and a
slew of others. Remember that load averages can also exceed 100%, indicating that
your CPU is overloaded with the tasks in queue.

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