Server load is a measure of how much work the server is handling. A high load does not always mean the server is broken, but sustained high load can cause slow websites, failed requests, email delays or control panel timeouts.
Common causes of high load
- Busy WordPress or WooCommerce sites.
- Malware or spam scripts.
- Large backups running.
- Heavy database queries.
- Bot traffic or attacks.
- Too many PHP processes.
- Disk I/O bottlenecks.
What administrators check
- Top processes.
- CPU usage.
- Memory usage.
- Disk I/O wait.
- Apache/LiteSpeed status.
- MySQL process list.
- Mail queue.
- Recent traffic spikes.
Best practice
Do not judge server health from load alone. CPU, memory, disk I/O, network traffic and process behaviour all need to be reviewed together.
Need help?
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