Is my Server Oversold???

[woolly bugger]

still having issues with timeouts and database errors when posting or sending PMs on my board http://www.brfff.com/forum/  i'm using InMotionHosting.

in checking settings for load balancing (which isn't an option) I saw this...

The current load average is 9.23

Is this way high???

[vbgamer45]

Yes that is very high!

[Colin]

To understand the load average number, you need to know how many CPUs your system has. A load average of 9.23 would indicate a system with a single or dual CPU was massively overloaded, but it would be fine on a computer with 12 CPUs. Also what time period is this load average over?

[woolly bugger]

[tier1adv@biz164 ~]$ uptime
 06:01:58 up 165 days, 18:26,  3 users,  load average: 11.11, 10.01, 8.43
[tier1adv@biz164 ~]$

48 cores....

[Illori]

is this a shared hosting/VPS or dedicated server?

[Looking]

Based on the content and users online your forum is not so large to be causing all of that resource usage, looks like its other users on the host. Even with VPS you are still at the mercy of other users.

[Colin]

[tier1adv@biz164 ~]$ uptime
06:01:58 up 165 days, 18:26,  3 users,  load average: 11.11, 10.01, 8.43
[tier1adv@biz164 ~]$

48 cores....

Are you sure it has 48 cores?

[woolly bugger]

is this a shared hosting/VPS or dedicated server?

shared hosting...

[rooterone]

While these type lookups are often incorrect to some degree, they do offer some indication; hxxp:whois.domaintools.com/brfff.com [nonactive]

IP Address    23.235.209.135 - 624 other sites hosted on this server

[LiroyvH]

Yeah but they really don't. Some of those even count subdomains as another website.
The trouble with those sites is you can't really conclude anything from it. Is it a Pentium 4 server with 512MB ram running that many sites, or is it a IP linked to a cloud setup that can scale to hundreds of vCores if needs be with gigs and gigs of RAM?
And the websites, are they 624 highly dynamic sites; or are there 600 "grandma's knitting tips" plain-HTML sites on it and just 24 smallish sites with some dynamic content?

It's not really possible to determine whether or not a server is oversold sheerly from the, alleged, number of websites active on said server.
I do know IMH's techs spend quite some time on keeping their servers fast n happy, so based on that CPU load on the mentioned amount of cores: seems to me like it's running just fine. (Could still be oversold though, but at this point with that load I don't think you'd notice anything of it...) Say we'd all bring it down by a factor 12, so the amount of accounts causing load (and for the sake of argument: we're assuming each site generates the same load ) and the amount of cores available.

If we calculate it back to a mere 4 cores and also lower the load accordingly (really not technically possible, this is just a hypothetical thing to help understand how this is relatively not a bad load): a CPU load of 11.12 would then be 0.92 on the 4 core server under the, scaled, same load. That's perfectly fine.


Are you having issues with slowness of your websites with the CPU load? Or just asking as you're interested to know whether or not this specific server is oversold?
That last question is hard to answer, but in general: IMH does indeed oversell. (Unlimited, ain't possible.) As long as you don't experience any issues with it and are happy at the moment, I wouldn't mind too much about it though: but if you're running in to issues then it would be time to perhaps look at a new host that does not oversell. To be fair here, of all oversellers I have encountered: IMH is one of the few who actually care about the performance of their systems (and thus their clients) and take quite a few measures without screwing over the client with generic slowness and constant problems; but rather try to keep delivering performance to all customers... And do a pretty decent job at that, even though sometimes the resource limitations per account might be very annoying and cause trouble for your site when all you needed was a short moment of bursting. That's the compromise that was made. Long as you're happy: then in this case I'd say it's likely not much to worry about that they're oversold, until you actually experience trouble. And it's very very rare I say that. I always suggest to avoid all oversellers, and you really should, but if you already chose on and you're happy: then in this case I'd argue not to worry about it, knowing what they do with their servers to try and make the best out of the situation.

[rooterone]

Agreed. I was somewhat hesitant to even mention it because hardware and management are huge factors.

I'm not familiar with the folks @ IMH. Since you are, I'll just shut up now. 

[a10]

Ref CoreISP post above.

It's not really possible to determine whether or not a server is oversold sheerly from the, alleged, number of websites active on said server.

Indeed. Got one domain (with a forum) on an inexpensive shared host, domaintools.com info:

16,042 other sites hosted on this server

Should be very bad, no? But excellent and no problems, everything fast and stable.