The server I'm trying to maintain is sassing me.
Among other things, I ran tload. This probably provides helpful information to someone who knows how to read this data. I do not.
It says:
1.36, 1.12, 0.59 -------------
What should I glean from this? This is our home-grown stat server, it gets a crap-ton of requests, and runs logrotate & crons a log parsing script. It also generates static JSON files containing 'top 10' content lists, and serves requests for those.
Need more info? Just ask
Those are the load averages for the past 1, 5 and 15 minute intervals. A load average above 1 means that processes are waiting on the CPU. Here is a Wikipedia article on load averages.
Because your load averages are decreasing, it looks like you have short running, intermittent, heavy load on the server. It also means that you are likely CPU bound although that isn't necessarily so as memory or IO bottlenecks could cause a lot of context switching.
That said, 1.36 isn't that high, so I would look at memory or IO constraints.