High System Load
 

Hi,
What are the causes or reasons for the high system load on the server & how to detect the load other than top, uptime commands ?

Also how can the high system load problem can be resolved ?

What operating system you're using?

Command uptime only shows load avg. whereas top shows detailed information on each process and system memory utilizations.

In Sun solaris, it can be checked using prstat command.

Anyway, for basic troubleshooting, you need to know what processes are running and how much is their cpu utilization (ofcourse using top). A high load could be because of lack of enough memory for processing.

However, there could be multiple reasons, but all depends upon what issue you're facing.

And also how can you say that load is high on your system - just by seeing the load avg. values? Do you know the threshold values of load avg.? Or, do you feel any slowness? If it's slowness, then slowness in what - Internet or applications or OS itself or commands...?
It actually depends upon your system's HW and memory configurations.
So be little specific to the problem and show some more details.