High Processor Load on your cloud instance

High processor load or utilization on instances can be problematic for instance owners. Measuring CPU usage is crucial for evaluating overall system performance. In some cases, a high server load may result from increased traffic to your website, which is a positive sign. To address this issue, you can simply upgrade your server. However, there may be other factors causing high CPU utilization that require troubleshooting.

Impact of high usage on Instances

Whenever the CPU usage Goes high on your server, The Server and Website hosted on it will ultimately become Slow or Sometimes there is a chance of the Server getting Crash when the Load is too high.

That’s why we Provide real-time Monitoring options for all our Instances. You can configure Alerts for your Instance where the Load or CPU utilization of your server Increases above a certain Percentage an Alert will be received on your registered Email-id. We highly recommend you to Configure this alert to avoid any issues.

Causes of High CPU Utilization or Processor Load.

Resource issues on servers are a common problem. As mentioned earlier, this can be due to high traffic on your websites. If that’s not the case, let’s explore some common reasons for high CPU usage on nodes.

Incorrect Service Level Configuration

High CPU usage can often result from errors in service-level configurations. Services should be carefully optimized and fine-tuned before being deployed on production servers, taking into account both external and internal environments. Running multiple instances of the same service can also lead to high CPU usage.

Inadequate Server Resources

Insufficient Resources on Your Node can also trigger High CPU usage. The Resource allocation of your node should always be proportional to the amount of Usage.

Poorly configured Applications

Poorly configured applications can also contribute to high CPU usage. For example, running a backup process during peak times when server resources are already at full capacity can result in high utilization. Similarly, it’s important to ensure that cron jobs are not run simultaneously and are scheduled at appropriate times to maintain normal utilization.

How to Fix High CPU Usage

There are numerous ways of monitoring system load average few are uptime which shows how long the system has been running, the number of users together with load averages:

The numbers are read from left to right, and the output above means that:

load average over the last 1 minute is 0.18
load average over the last 5 minutes is 0.07
load average over the last 15 minutes is 0.02
High load averages imply that a system is overloaded; many processes are waiting for CPU time.

top which shows the top running process which is consuming more CPU or RAM

top

With the above command, you will be able to look at top-consuming Processes and Take necessary actions.

The ps command reports a snapshot of a system’s currently running processes. If you want to List the details of a specific process, You can use the below command. For example to check MySQL Process consumption. You can grep Mysql from the Ps command which will display the Process ID and Processes running.

ps -ef | grep mysql

Similarly, If you want to gracefully stop a running process that has been causing high utilization on your server, You can use The syntax for the pkill command as follows

pkill processname

To kill a particular process, You can use the Process id

kill -9 pid

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