Servers @ 100% load, 7days/week

enmasse

Honorable
Apr 24, 2012
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10,530
Recently I've become increasingly concerned with how much I stress my server farm.

I brought up HWinfo and noticed that each server (A farm of 20) are each running at 100% CPU load, 7 days a week. The processors on each is an Xeon L5320 @ 1.86ghz (8 CPUs).

My operation consists running 6 active OS's through VMware and leaving them to automate their tasks. I tried fiddling around with the CPU allocation settings on VMware, but I don't think it's really had any affect on usage or performance.

Is it safe to leave my servers on for extended amounts of time @ 100% load? Of course, I give them a few hours of down-time per week.

Edit: Some additional info: the server models are DL 140s G3, outfitted with 8GB RAM each
 
Solution
This is one reason why Xeons cost so much more than desktop processors, reliability. The processors are designed to be reliable, so there is no damage caused at running them @100% load.