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smusumeche
Asked: 2015-05-20 00:13:48 +0800 CST

Understanding CPU% on Apache Extended Server Status

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I just migrated an existing fairly high traffic website to a Digital Ocean droplet and I viewed the Apache extended server status page. It shows the information below. One thing I noticed is that the CPU is listed at 269% load. How can that be? Is this good or bad? How can I interpret these numbers?

Apache Server Status for xx.xx.xxx

Server Version: Apache/2.2.15 (Unix) DAV/2 PHP/5.4.40 mod_ssl/2.2.15 OpenSSL/1.0.1e-fips
Server Built: Oct 16 2014 14:48:21
Current Time: Tuesday, 19-May-2015 04:11:17 EDT
Restart Time: Tuesday, 19-May-2015 04:06:06 EDT
Parent Server Generation: 0
Server uptime: 5 minutes 10 seconds
Total accesses: 1139 - Total Traffic: 280.7 MB
CPU Usage: u778.49 s54.72 cu0 cs0 - 269% CPU load
3.67 requests/sec - 0.9 MB/second - 252.4 kB/request
12 requests currently being processed, 11 idle workers
linux

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    First the descriptions of the fields:

    • u778.49: seconds spent in userspace
    • s54.72: seconds spent during system calls
    • Both together are the complete amount of seconds CPU time: 833.21

    Here is how the percentage is calculated. Your machine runs for 5 minutes and 10 seconds, so 310 seconds. The total amount of CPU time divided trough the total amount of seconds uptime gives CPU percentage:

    833.21/310=2.687*100%=269%

    But your system most probably has multiple CPUs. You can divide that value trough the number of CPUs.

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