Linux acceptable load average

Question

I have a linux dedicated server machine(8cores 8gbRAM) where i run some crawler php scripts. The load on the system ends up being arround 200, which sounds a lot. Since i am not using the machine to host content, what could be the sideeffects of such high level of load for the purposes stated above.

Answer 1

Machines were made to work so there are no issues with high load average, per se. But, a high load average can be an indicator of a performance issue, often. Such investigation is usually application specific, but here is a very general guideline:

Since load average is a combined metric of (CPU, IO .. etc) you want to examine all separately. I would start with making sure the machine is not thrashing, by checking swap usage (vmstat comes in handy), and disk performance (using iostat). You may also check if your operations are CPU intensive.

Answer 2

You should read your load average value as a 3 component value (1 minute load, 5 minutes load and 15 minutes load respectively).

Take a look at the example taken from Wiki:

For example, one can interpret a load average of "1.73 0.60 7.98" on a single-CPU system as:

• during the last minute, the system was overloaded by 73% on average (1.73 runnable processes, so that 0.73 processes had to wait for a turn for a single CPU system on average).
• during the last 5 minutes, the CPU was idling 40% of the time on average.
• during the last 15 minutes, the system was overloaded 698% on average (7.98 runnable processes, so that 6.98 processes had to wait for a turn for a single CPU system on average).

Full article

Please note that this value depends on the resources of your machine.

Cheers!