I apologize for this being a stupid question. I spend most of my time on stackoverflow and feel like a fish out of water over here.
I have a standard Digital Ocean droplet, paying $5 a month, and getting 1vCPU, 1 GB Memory, 1TB transfer. I got an email from someone saying that the server was taking a really long time to respond. I logged into digital ocean and looked at their graphs, and it looks like the server was only using 2 or 3% CPU, about 20kbps on bandwidth, and 200kBps disc. I'm under the impression the max should be about 100%, and that 2 or 3% shouldn't be an issue. Looking at the graphs, I had wouldn't have suspected there was anything wrong with the server.
Now When I SSHed into the droplet, and run the uptime command and it showed the load was about 1.3. Now I read that load is not the same as CPU, but I was under the impression that if the load was consistently above 1 then the CPU should be pretty close to 100%. What am I not understanding? Having an average load above 1.3 explains why it's slow. But it also seems to me like it shouldn't be dreadfully slow. Is there something else I should be looking at?
Not knowing what to do (restarting the server didn't change the Load average, and that's where I ran out of ideas), I thought that as a temporary solution, I would just throw more money at the problem, so I upgraded to the $10 a month, 2GB and 2TB droplet. Since it has the same number of vCPUs I wasn't sure if anything would change, but I thought I'd try it. To my surprise, 30 minutes later, when I run uptime the 15 minute average is now 0.02. I thought, maybe the site is down? But it's still online. Again I'm very confused. I expected if there was going to be any change, it would take the load down to 0.6 or something, not 0.02! I just need someone to hold my hand and explain some basics to me. Thanks.
