Hi all, I'm turning to this great community for some help/advise.
I'm absolutely flabergasted with this issue.

One of my servers is experiencing some significant load issues, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. This box has been very reliable over the past year, in fact, experienced over 200 days uptime until I rebooted a week ago in an attempt to resolve the problem. No new accounts have been added to this server in the past 30 days, and from what I can tell, traffic overall has not increased (averaging about 80GB transfer per month). In addition, no new scripts have been uploaded to the server that would be causing the problem that I can tell.

Anyways, the server is a P4 2.0g, 512MB ram. Disk/swap is not an issue. Server will be performing fine at loads in the .30 to .50 range across the board, but several times a day will spike upwards of 2.5+ and 1.5+ across the board. I have captured one of those times here in TOP and attached. Websites definately experience slowdown/performance issues when this occurs. Normal number of processes for this box is 80-95. You can see on the attached there are over 150 processes running.

What I have done in an effort to fix the problem:
-Disabled all chat services and Interchange within WHM
-Rebooted

I'm stuck, and need some advise as to how to track down the root cause of the issue. Thanks.

The top few are all httpd eating quite a chunk of resources. There's a few possibilities.
1. Someone is doing a low level dos on your http services.

2. You had been hacked and may be compromised, and those times you see the load spiking may be the hackers doing some hanky panky on your system.

3. You simply have a user that has installed a badly written script and is simply killing your server with it (one of the most common reasons)

4. One of the sites may have some surge in popularity (from some publicity perhaps) and is being overloaded. But I would reckon this would show on the bandwidth charts. So reason 3 is one of the most probable.

I suggest you start by installing mod-status for Apache (if you haven't) and check if you can see who's causing the increased loads.

From that screen shot, your swaping on memory pretty hard. I'd recommend a ram upgrade.

Yes. If it is has happened suddenly though, within the last 30 days as mentioned, increasing the RAM may not find the root of the problem, and sometimes it can be indications of something ominous.

Increasing the ram will solve the surface problems, but may not solve the root issue if there's one.

Thanks for the replies all. I will look into installing mod-status. Sprintserve - do you happen to have a link?

Thanks again,

It's part of core Apache.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_status.html

Alright, I got it installed, thanks for the tip. I'm not seeing anything that usual but I will keep an eye on it for now. 43 http processes on average for the server, but right now it's idling around .5 across the board.