When I check status through cpanel I see
"Server Load 1.07 (1 cpu) " It has been staying around there lately. So I logged in and did top through the shell and watched that for a good 5 minutes. The CPU didn't go below 95%, yet Cpanel still says 1.07 or above whenever I check it. As fas as I can tell from reading the forums anything over 1 is bad?

Thanks

I personally like to play it safe and have it below 1 but it does not meet that 1 and above is dangerous. In fact 1 does not indicate 100% CPU usage. It is some number based on some computation based years ago from what I could tell.

As long as your server seems fast enough and not choking and the swap is kept low then there is nothing to worry about.

I guess back in the days, if you have a 1ghz CPU, 1 would probably represent close to the 100%. If you are running a 2.4ghz CPU then you could probably spike to 2.0 and still not face any issues.

The way I've always understood it is that load is the number of processes waiting for 1 CPU to process them.

So in theory a hyperthreaded server would be fine with a load between 1 and say 1.5 (assuming that hyperthreading is less than 100% efficient at creating a second vritual cpu.)

As Edwin says, cpu usage and load are not the same thing at all. Load is also impacted by IO / hard drive access, etc.