average cpu load = 3% is that high?

[adam]

i am running the perfect debian setup (pretty much from the guide). The only differences is vhcs2 is running my virtual hosting. I don't have anything too funky running so i am wondering if this average of 3% all the time is quite high for a pentium 2.4ghz with 1gb of ram?

ps aux tells me that

root 4261 3.4 0.1 7300 1912 ? R Sep12 1114:16 /usr/sbin/saslauthd -m /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd -r -a rimap -O 127.0.0.1
root 4262 3.4 0.1 7300 1920 ? R Sep12 1119:30 /usr/sbin/saslauthd -m /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd -r -a rimap -O 127.0.0.1

www-data 15880 0.4 1.4 27680 15228 ? S 23:31 0:06 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start -DSSL
www-data 15916 0.3 1.5 28100 15680 ? S 23:31 0:05 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start -DSSL
www-data 16003 0.3 1.4 27656 15148 ? S 23:31 0:04 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start -DSSL
amavis 16056 0.0 3.0 34248 31644 ? S 23:35 0:00 amavisd (child)
www-data 16661 0.5 1.4 27172 14680 ? S 23:46 0:03 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start -DSSL
www-data 16663 0.3 1.2 25576 12876 ? S 23:46 0:02 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start -DSSL
www-data 16686 0.3 1.2 25648 13136 ? S 23:48 0:01 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start -DSSL
www-data 16820 0.3 1.2 25608 13004 ? S 23:51 0:01 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start -DSSL
www-data 16821 0.3 1.1 24740 12308 ? S 23:51 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start -DSSL
www-data 16822 0.4 1.2 25600 13044 ? S 23:51 0:01 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start -DSSL
www-data 16945 0.4 1.1 24732 12064 ? S 23:54 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start -DSSL
www-data 16976 0.6 1.3 26032 13384 ? S 23:55 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start -DSSL
www-data 16991 0.5 1.1 24540 11860 ? S 23:55 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start -DSSL


these are the main processes.


Also, my system ram only ever has about 20mb free? Is this efficient use of ram , i.e using ALL the ram or is it quite high too?

the server seems to be running ok though.

[Ben]

Linux tries to allocate as much as making sense and buffers many things. For you it looks like the ram is completely used...
(more: cat /proc/meminfo)

[falko]

Originally Posted by adam

Also, my system ram only ever has about 20mb free? Is this efficient use of ram , i.e using ALL the ram or is it quite high too?

As Ben said, Linux caches lots of things, so your memory usage is ok.

[adam]

what about the cpu use though?

[Ben]

in my eyes 3% is not very high, but you have to distinguish load from cpuusage.
Next thing is, what applications are running on your server and the intensity they are used... so you can't say a cpu usage of x percent is high or low without knowing what really happens on that machine (even saying there are some webpages doing some "simple" DB-requests is too imprecise...)

[adam]

yeah thats why i pasted the output of ps aux and listed the things that seemed to be taking up the most processing time. You can see ther that saslauthd is taking up 3.4% all the time .

[falko]

I think your system is running fine. Nothing unusual here.