Ok, our server has been running flawlessly for the last 144 days as everything has been running smoothly, and hasn't needed a reboot. Now for some reason, cURL when executed by our billing script is taking 90-98% of the servers resources. Nothing was changed on the server except for an upgrade in php from version from 4.1.0 to 4.1.2.
Does anyone know what might wrong with the server, because we cannot take on new clients anymore due to this problem?

Here is the contents of the top command

15744 web 15 0 1668 1668 1264 R 0 99.1 0.1 4:13 curl
17106 root 12 0 852 852 664 R 0 8.4 0.0 0:02 top
28716 mysql 6 5 2136 2136 1336 S N 0 0.1 0.1 0:00 mysqld
17100 root 0 0 1536 1536 1332 S 0 0.1 0.0 0:00 sshd
14302 root 0 0 1144 1144 1020 S 0 0.0 0.0 0:00 sshd
28652 root 0 0 704 704 580 S 0 0.0 0.0 0:00 crond
28653 admin 0 0 1720 1720 1096 S 0 0.0 0.1 0:00 popauthd
28655 root 0 0 816 816 648 S 0 0.0 0.0 0:00 su
28658 admin 0 0 1596 1596 500 S 0 0.0 0.1 0:00 syslogd
28660 mysql 0 0 832 832 668 S 0 0.0 0.0 0:00 safe_mysqld
28666 daemon 0 0 504 504 424 S 0 0.0 0.0 0:00 atd
28687 mysql 5 5 2136 2136 1336 S N 0 0.0 0.1 0:00 mysqld
28699 web 0 0 3748 3748 3656 S 0 0.0 0.2 0:00 httpd
28717 mysql 5 5 2136 2136 1336 S N 0 0.0 0.1 0:00 mysqld
28746 admin 0 0 4368 4368 1944 S 0 0.0 0.2 0:00 miniserv.pl
28748 web 0 0 4928 4928 3984 S 0 0.0 0.3 0:00 httpd
28749 web 0 0 4840 4840 3944 S 0 0.0 0.3 0:00 httpd

Any help is greatly appreciated
Thanks
Steven

The first thing I would do is reduce the priority of the script in order for not lag out of the console.

"renice 20 PID"

Upgrade to the latest cURL version, or try to recompile the old one. Also recompile php with the newest cURL.