All posts tagged: CPU

What is the true meaning of system average load and CPU utilization in Linux?

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The CPU average load value is a very important metric to understand the behavior of a Linux system, and especially its current and recent past status. Many times there is confusion between this term and percentage of CPU usage, but differences are important. In this article I will try to explain the true meaning of both and how to tell if a Linux box is overloaded or underutilized.

DanielWhat is the true meaning of system average load and CPU utilization in Linux?

Differences between physical CPU vs logical CPU vs Core vs Thread vs Socket

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When we try to know a computer’s architecture and performance at CPU level using Linux commands like nproc or lscpu, we often find out that we are not able to properly interpret their results because we confuse terms such as physical CPU, logical CPU, virtual CPU, core, thread, socket, etc. If we add concepts like HyperThreading (not to be confused with multithreading), we are in a situation where we can not be sure how many cores our box has, we don’t understand why commands like htop indicate that we have 8 cpus when we thought we had bought a single quad-core processor, etc. In short, it’s a mess.

DanielDifferences between physical CPU vs logical CPU vs Core vs Thread vs Socket

High CPU load when converting images with ImageMagick

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In certain versions of ImageMagick there is a problem (probably due to a bug) when trying to convert or manipulate an image either from the command line (convert command) or through one of the many API’s available (for example PHP). The CPU usage suddenly grows beyond 100% (because this problem occurs on multiprocessor systems) and the system becomes extremely slow. Apart from this high CPU load, the conversion process also gets blocked, never reaching to the end. This occurs even with small images of few kilobytes.

DanielHigh CPU load when converting images with ImageMagick