A friend just sent me an SOS but unfortunately I'm not very familiar with the problem he's facing so I'm hoping someone here could help.

He's been having problems with his sites and boards crashing. Apparently, the problem was traced to a php script that is doing heavy mySQL usage. He doesn't know what php script could be doing this or if it's even him. What can he do to find out? PHP runs as 'nobody' so it would be difficult to trace.

Is there a possibility that a spyder (?) could be causing this? Someone mentioned to him that this was something they encountered as well.

Thanks in advance for the help.

if he uses phpBB with a ton of mods then that could be the cause.. you can always do debugging by showing the load time of a script.