Diagnosing high user time

• a common and relatively simple problem to diagnose is high load due to a high percentage of user cpu time.

• this is common since the services on your server are likely to take the bulk of the system load and they are user processes.

• if you see higher cpu time but low I/O wait times, you simply need to identify which processes on the system are consuming the most cpu resources, such as a large number of apache processes, java or mysql and backups running at the time.