---
title: "Interpreting a Load Average Chart on Acquia Cloud Classic"
date: "2025-02-06T01:26:45+00:00"
summary:
image:
type: "article"
url: "/acquia-cloud-platform/help/92431-interpreting-load-average-chart-acquia-cloud-classic"
id: "7d3d7d69-0833-47d9-a526-1ca8836347af"
---

Over the course of an Acquia Support ticket, a support engineer may drop in a graph that looks like this showing load average on your [Acquia Cloud Classic](/node/55808) instances:

    ---- PROD -------------------------------------------------------------------
    Server           AMI Type     #Cores     Date     Time     1m     5m     15m
    bal-12345        c5.xlarge        2  2021-06-30 13:41:59   0.11   0.05   0.01
    bal-12346        c5.xlarge        2  2021-06-30 13:42:00   0.02   0.05   0.03
    web-12345        c5a.2xlarge      8  2021-06-30 13:42:01   0.66   0.73   0.63
    web-12346        c3.2xlarge       8  2021-06-30 13:42:03   0.22   0.18   0.16
    fsdb-12345       m3.2xlarge       4  2021-06-30 13:42:04   3.31   2.12   1.13
    fsdb-12346       m3.2xlarge       4  2021-06-30 13:42:05   0.05   0.16   0.24
    svn-12345        c4.xlarge        4  2021-06-30 13:42:06   0.12   0.33   0.38

In this fictional example, this is a customer's production environment with [multi-tier](/node/57081) setup.

*   Server: Which instance. In this example, there are two load balancers, two web instances, and two file-system/database volumes, plus an "svn" server (which is a legacy name for our Git repository instances, and you can normally disregard that line).
*   AMI Type: This is the designation of the resources allocated to the instances.
*   Cores: How many CPU cores are allocate to the instance.
*   Date and Time columns: These are the times at which the measurements were taken, and are in the UTC time zone.
*   1m, 5m, and 15m columns: The numbers here are of 1 minute ago, 5 minutes ago, and 15 minutes ago, respectively; they represent the average load placed on the instances.
    *   If the numbers are larger than the number in the Cores column, then the instance is under high strain. When reading the numbers from right to left (from 15 minutes to 1 minute), you can determine whether load has been increasing or decreasing.

Things to check if the instances are under high strain:

*   Visit our list of tips to [improve the performance of your application](/node/55842).
*   Is there a high number of recent requests in [the Drupal requests log](/node/56393)? That means that all parts of the platform are being invoked frequently, and you should [introduce caching](/node/55842) and/or a CDN to your environments.
*   Our application monitoring tools like [New Relic](/node/56377) can be very useful in troubleshooting performance bottlenecks.