My server is showing high CPU load, is this normal?

Sometimes when running commands such as htop, you may see results that look "out of the ordinary" such as high CPU load, for example. This is nothing to worry about. In our environment, we are using LXC Linux containers rather than QEMU KVM virtual machines to provide a secure multi-tenant platform. What you are seeing is load being generated by other users on the same server node.

There are many benefits to this approach including better network and disk performance, as well as drastically reduced overhead because your VPS does not need to run a kernel. This also means you get to see more details of the underlying server hardware, including physical CPU utilization where other users' utilization will appear as system utilization. Unfortunately, HTOP does not distinguish between system CPU utilization and user utilization, so it will appear as your own.

There is no need to worry about loss of performance, as CPU cores are dynamically assigned - when you generate load your processes will be run on the least loaded cores available. If you have any other questions or concerns please contact us.