Question
How can you tell whether your server's load average is high?
Answer
The solution would be to check the number of cores on the server. You can do so with the nproc command:
[root@server ~]cPS# nproc
2
From the above output, you can see the server has 2 cores. As such, a load average of 2 would indicate the server's cores are working at their full capacity. If the load average is less than the number of CPU cores on the server, the load average should generally not be a cause for concern.
To check your server's load averages for the day, you can utilize the sar command with the -q flag.