How to resolve high server load

If your server load is high (server loads that are ⇐ the number of CPU Cores in your server are quite normal), you need to locate the bottleneck and make optimizations targeting it.

• It is always good practice to use the top command to check which processes are using a lot of CPU resources and figure out whether they are behaving normally.
• If disk I/O is high, it is likely a disk I/O problem, which you should address. If you have more free memory available, you can move php sessions to /dev/shm.
• Check the CPU idle percentage. If it is close to 0%, then your server is CPU-bound and you should try to reduce the CPU usage.
• Try to use our LSCache solutions to lower the load.
• Enable PHP opcode cache.
• Check the real time stats for the number of PHP processes during peak time (LSWS Web Admin → Actions → Real-Time Stats→External Application), check In Use, Idle, and WaitQ. For shared hosting, if one user uses too many PHP processes while others only use a few, you may adjust PHP max concurrency setting to be a smaller number. See our PHP Concurrency wiki for more information on determining if PHP SuEXEC is used and how to reduce the max concurrency of PHP.
• Check the number of concurrent users to see if it is normal: netstat -na | grep 80 | grep ESTA
• For control panel users, check your PHP configuration and make sure Apache and LiteSpeed have matching PHPs.
• Sometimes high load can be caused by poorly written PHP/SQL code and has to be fixed by your PHP Developers. Sometimes it is a MySQL-based problem, for example, you may have a missing index. To debug this, you may try to use mysqladmin and processlist. No web server configuration change can help such situations and they are beyond our support scope. You can even use strace to track your PHP processes: strace -tt -T -p

  <pid_of_a_php_process>
  
    top - 15:28:56 up 1 day, 17:58, 3 users, load average: 187.42, 143.52, 109.09
    PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
    25713 mysql 20 0 15.3g 784m 9.9m S 197.1 0.9 29:13.90 /usr/sbin/mysqld --basedir=/usr --  datadir=/var/lib/mysql --plugin-
    30260 roan24pl 20 0 302m 103m 12m R 34.4 0.1 1:37.47 lsphp:/home/roan24pl/public_html/index.php
    30448 roan24pl 20 0 302m 103m 12m R 26.0 0.1 1:09.17 lsphp:/home/roan24pl/public_html/index.php
    30217 roan24pl 20 0 302m 102m 12m R 25.0 0.1 1:27.36 lsphp:/home/roan24pl/public_html/index.php
    28755 roan24pl 20 0 291m 92m 12m R 24.0 0.1 6:52.65 lsphp:/home/roan24pl/public_html/index.php

Addressing the above may lower your server load. However, your situation may vary greatly. We recommend ordering our LiteSpeed premium support service for a professional review, fine tuning, and installation/enabling of necessary elements to reduce your server load and maximize site performance.