For those using delicated or vps how do you measure and monitor the load so that your server are able to handle?

For example how do you know the peak load, the database load, etc.?
When do you know it is time to upgrade?

login as root and type in top. There you'll see your load, mem usage and all that kind of stuff. Fire it up in the prime time and check if the load stays allright.

there's software that can help you find the peak connections your server can handle

I'd ask on a Linux forum, sorry I can't be more specific

Hi,

Try VPSInfo - www(DOT)labradordata.ca/vpsinfo/

Its pretty good at monitoring both VPS and dedicated servers, theres also an extra script at the above URL which is simalar to MRTG.

Thanks Rick for pointing out vpsinfo.

A simple way to check uptime is to use the "uptime" or "top" command. Depends on your account you might want to login a casual user or root.

Uptime is basically the number of active processes running at 1, 5 and 15 minutes, respectively.

For processes, use "ps" or "pstree" to see a list of threaded processes.

Install MRTG or rrdtools and feed data to them to create nice and customized graphs of the entire system.

For database, I know MySQL is able to handle a high number of queries per second. The two most common bottleneck are disks and memory. So they are somewhat related to system load.

The rule of thumb is if your system constantly reporting a load average of 3.0 or more, you are running out of resources.

I know this isnt exactly a monitiring tool, but i've always found phpsysinfo good at displaying load, uptime, memory and disk usage...

URL: http://phpsysinfo.sourceforge.net/

Thanks for the suggestions.

top and uptime just give a snapshot so they're not an option since one can't look at them whole day.

Will take a look at phpsysinfo and vpsinfo they look promising.