The LVE (Lightweight Virtual Environment) technology of the CloudLinux operating system confines each hosting account to its own, isolated resource quota on a shared server. This means that an overloaded website will not slow down other customers’ sites; however, your own account may slow down or return an error once the resource limit is reached. It is therefore worth knowing how to check in real time how much of your allocated resources you are currently using.

Viewing resource usage in cPanel

1. Log in to your cPanel account.
2. On the ‘Statistics’ panel on the left-hand side of the cPanel home page, you can immediately see the current CPU, memory, I/O and process usage compared to the limits.
3. For more detailed data broken down by time periods, click on the Resource Usage icon, which can be found in the Metrics section. On the Current Usage tab, you can select a time period (for example, the last 10 minutes or 24 hours), whilst on the Snapshot tab you can see which processes, database queries and URLs were running when the limit was reached.

The page does not refresh automatically: when testing for peak load, please refresh it every few minutes, or select the shortest time interval.

What resources does it display?

• CPU usage (SPEED): the amount of processor time used; 100% corresponds to one full processor core.
• Physical memory (PMEM): the memory used by the account’s processes.
• I/O: the read and write speed of a hard disk.
• IOPS: the number of disk operations per second.
• Entry Processes (EP): the number of requests served simultaneously (PHP scripts, SSH and cron processes).
• NPROC: the number of all processes and threads running in the account.

The exact meaning of each limit is explained in detail in the article on CloudLinux resource limits.

Checking via SSH

If your hosting plan includes SSH access, you can view your own processes in real time using the top command. Due to CageFS, only processes belonging to your own account will be displayed, making it easy to identify which PHP process or cron job is running for an extended period. Press the q key to exit. You can read about how to use this command in our articles on ‘top’ and ‘htop’.

On your own CloudLinux server, as the root_user, the lvetop and lveps commands show the current usage of all accounts. This article discusses these command-line LVE management tools.

What does it mean if I reach the limit?

If any resource reaches the LVE limit associated with your account, your website may temporarily respond more slowly, or certain requests may be rejected with a 508 error message (‘Resource Limit Is Reached’) until the load decreases. When the memory limit is reached, the system may terminate processes, which may result in a 500 error or an interrupted script execution. We have described what the fault counters mean in the event of limit exceedances in a separate article.

What should you do if you regularly reach the limit?

• Check the ‘Snapshot’ tab to see which URL or script is being repeated. Common causes include wp-cron.php, admin-ajax.php, a search engine page or an aggressive bot.
• Check whether there are any plugins, scripts or database queries that are causing an unnecessarily high load.
• Enable caching to reduce server-side load.
• If your website’s traffic warrants it, upgrade to a plan with a higher resource allowance, or opt for a dedicated cPanel server, where you do not share resources with other users.