Best approach to checking the data from Graphs - CPU %?

The cheap and quick way to see cpu hogs is to use the command top at a terminal. You can also batch the output to a file (using the -b option), but be sure to use a time limit (the -n option) with a reasonable sampling period (-d option) because the file can grow large if your duration of interest happens to be long. Example command to run top for 24 hours at 15 second intervals:

top -b -d 15 -n 5760 > /tmp/top.out
#after it's done
grep -n "load average" /tmp/top.out | more

That’s 24 hours * 60 min/hour * 4 samples/min. The line numbers from the grep output on the left column corresponds to the line number in the file, which you can use to match the times when your load average reaches high levels.

Good hunting.

I could really use some help understanding it but I found some culprits. I had noticed sometimes on my graphs it would spike to 70% or even 90%.

This is what comes up for the high CPU hogs (I added in the “user…” line and the acct in brackets): user cpu mem time app [root] 95.4 21.0 0:21.97 update-apt-+ [root] 50.8 11.8 0:07.63 update-apt-+ [root] 65.7 7.9 0:09.89 unattended-+

^ Come to think of it, that’s probably serverpilot doing it’s thing huh…

@gndo do you have any preferences for terminals? I used putty way back in the day and was wondering if people use anything else lol.

I found this, “sp-agent” running on linux as a top (only .2% cpu lol)

What’s it for?

As an aside, could the 2-6% be normal operating procedures and the jump to 12% be my own self visiting my website and thus utilizing all the services/features? Lol. Mindgasm ;)