Question
Much higher CPU load than usage on database
My managed Postgre database is showing a lot higher average load compared to CPU usage. How should I interpret this? (The cluster has 2 vCPU.)
As far as I understand, a CPU load of 2 would be 100% usage with 2vCPUs. I don’t understand why it’s maintaining 4-5 load with only 60-80% usage. (The load is not primarily from a single connection, btw, it’s spread over 6-10.)
If I go by load, my cluster seems way overloaded. But if I go by CPU usage, it seems healthy and fine.
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Hey Adam,
The CPU Usage shows how much of the CPU’s capacity is being used.
And the Load Average on the other side, shows the number of processes waiting to run or running.
Even if your CPU usage is only 60-80%, the load average can still be high if there are a lot of processes waiting in line. This usually happens when your system is doing lots of disk I/O (like reading/writing to the disk), waiting for resources, or running many queries at the same time.
Since your cluster has 2 vCPUs, a load average of 2 would mean the CPUs are fully utilized. But since your load average is 4-5, it means there are more processes waiting to be handled by the CPU. This is why it seems overloaded by load average but looks fine on CPU usage.
You might want to check disk I/O and see if there are any slow queries or heavy operations that could be causing this.
You might also want to check out these guides here:
Hope this clears things up!
- Bobby