Look, almost all servers these days (except for scientific computing and Java-based servers) are running stuff that is I/O bound. As soon as a process requests IO, there is a context switch and the possibility for the kernel to run another process. Since CPUs are so fast these days, and what web servers actually do so computationally frivolous, this IO/context-switching can happen 10 to 20 times a second per process. This means you can easily have 10 processes “waiting to run” that will run this second. I’ve seen loads of 30 or 40 while the average CPU idle time was 80%.

21:26:52 up 124 days, 2:09, 0 users, load average: 0.18, 0.29, 0.33

It’s good. It means your server has been up for a while without interuption. The load average of 0.18 is the immediate load, 0.29 is higher and reflects the load over the past 5 minutes, and 0.33 is higher still and reflects the average load over the past 15 minutes. It means your server was busier about fifteen minutes ago but is coming back down now.

On my box, the top command aggregates all of the cpu’s together, so my theoretical “maximum” load would be 4.0 since I have 4 cpu’s and that would be 100% * 4. When I see a load of 0.20 overall it means that each cpu is contributing 0.05 to that number and my server is barely breaking a sweat. If you have a single cpu box a load of 0.33 means that you’re loaded (one third of the cpu is busy) but not overly so. Some would argue that since my server rarely exceeds 2.0 (50% capacity) that I am paying too much for hardware that I don’t need. But on the other hand, I also have hardware that can handle spikes in activity without going to its knees.

Here’s what I got just a few minutes ago for my server:

16:00:32 up 190 days, 4:18, 1 user, load average: 0.38, 0.34, 0.28

so just do this:

echo `uptime`

If that doesn’t work, then I don’t know.

It seems that your edit of Everett’s code did wonders, now I receive echo.

It says: 21:26:52 up 124 days, 2:09, 0 users, load average: 0.18, 0.29, 0.33

Is that good or bad numbers?

How do you do it? I can barely get one comment on a post, nevermind 8 or 9.

Possibly a rhetorical question, but I will answer anyway. First, start your blog two years ago. It takes a long time to build a discussion board. It can just as long (or longer) to build a blog. For grins I went back and looked at the first page of posts for this blog. It started in May of 2006. There were 9 posts made between then and July of 2006. There were 11 comments made. Of those 11 comments, 8 were from me. If you find a pacing that works for you, and can stick with it, then people will get used to going to your blog on a regular basis. I have been guilty of several lapses in posting over the years this blog has been in place but have been able to recover. But I don’t think I ever dropped out for more than five or six weeks straight.

I also make it a point to try to respond to any comment, and most especially to comments from first-time posters. Since I have Wordpress configured to require approval for the first post, it makes it a little easier to identify those folks.

@Everett, I think I was able to reformat your comment to show the code the way you wanted it to be shown. If I did it incorrectly, please let me know.

@dogs and things: some hosts disable the exec() function for security reasons. It’s running an operating system level command, which could literally be just about anything. Do you know if you’re running on a windows or linux host?

What am I supposed to do with that file, if I put it on my server and call it in my browser nothing shows, just the famous big blank space, but nothing is echoed?

Everett: to post code, it unfortunately needs to be in “code” brackets and you also have to convert the < into the HTML equivalent of &lt; to make it show up.

For what I almost considered a “throw-away” post this topic certainly seems to have provided some value. It was really just posted for filler.