My server is showing abnormal load. When I checked with WHM/Cpanel -> System status the Red button is coming with Server load status row and PHP's system uptime function showsing following details:

load average: 2.05


After looking into the System Health -> Show Current CPU Usage . I found following entries which are consuming CPU resources:

16311 nobody 0 97.2 72.9 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd-DSSL
16214 nobody 0 97.2 72.9 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd-DSSL
17045 root 0 1.3 0.1 top -n 2 -b -c
131 root 0 0.5 0.0 kjournald

I was wondering what does first 2 entries means which is owned by nobody?

And what is the top -n 2 -b -c & kjournald commands do which are owned by Root?

After few minutes of investigation when the Load remains save, I killed all the nobody operations. I need to kill the above 2 operation 2 times to put the server load in normal. I don't know whether its right to kill such operation or not. Can you suggest?

My Server is running with Red hat linux 7.3 with WHM/cpanel5.

Thanks.

Those are apache processes. They all run as nobody. Nobody is a "user" on your system. it's used to specify permissions.

Aaron

That mean by killing those process, which owned by nobody, I did something wrong?

Actually they will come back online if you kill nobody with in a few mins, i found that out the other day. Killing a process is used when a regular command doesnt work or you need to shut down something immediatly or something *specific* like instead of killing the whole apache daemon, you can kill just a certain process that apache is running... etc etc. Works for just bout anything

sounds like you have a broken apache install. I've seen some bad apache's do this from time to time, buggy versions, etc.

You could write a script to parse ps and nobody owned processes and kill them if their run time is to excessive. I've done that on some linux boxes with so-so problems.