Load average and memory usage

Over the past few days I've seen my shared server (forint) get quite slow at peak times (mostly around the afternoon US time).

The load average at these times frequently sits at around 20 and I've seen it hit 600. The server has 1.5 GB of memory of which all of it is almost always being used by processes. Most of the time there is about 800 MB of swap in use too. The output from top at the moment is the following (time is in GMT):

top - 23:57:27 up 1 day, 33 min,  4 users,  load average: 17.55, 20.77, 31.41
Tasks:   5 total,   1 running,   4 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):   1.4% user,   3.3% system,   7.7% nice,  87.6% idle
Mem:   1549476k total,  1504212k used,    45264k free,     1936k buffers
Swap:  6313512k total,   849468k used,  5464044k free,    94516k cached

What are the other shared servers like? Is this sort of loading normal?

no. well, could be normal for DH, but a properly configured server wouldn't go over a load of "1" unless something is wrong.

Server load isn't a function of being configured properly. It is a function of how busy the server is and the amount of cpu time being used. A perfectly configured, but busy, server can easily exceed a load average of 1. And they often do.

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