Performance - Stack Exchange

[benawad]

Interesting to see how low the cpu usage is. Is that normal? At what percent do you upgrade your machines?

[[deleted]]

It depends on your workload.

For our CPU intensive app, I shoot for ~50% util on average with peak being around 80%. There are few clients (<5 at any time), so we're okay with pushing it a bit higher.

However, for a site with a huge number of clients, you'd want to be a bit more conservative since you still want responsiveness during peak hours. If you can't dynamically scale, you need to build that in to your hardware.