On a cobalt Raq4 but am moving to RackLocation to my own dedicated server. However for some reason the Raq that i'm on now keeps getting a high load on it. Right now its over 10 and if I contact them then it usually ends up going back down in the 1's.

So is this from a bad written program?
Too many sites on the server?
They told me that there was like 65 sites on the server. Any way to tell how many there is by telneting in?
Or?

server specs
Raq4 256 ram

SSH in (ah, forget it, use telnet if you must, raqs are insecure to begin with) and run "top". That will tell you what is using all the cpu time.

You can check how many sites are on the server by grepping the apache conf file... unfortunately I don't have access to a raq to work out the exact syntax at the moment.

If you get really high loads and contact the company and they bring the load down, then it sounds to me like you have runaway processes or processes that eat up allot of processor time.

It sounds to me like you have one or multiple clients running certain CGI scripts that are causing the load of the server to go skyrocket. I'm asuming that your provider just jumps on the server and kills those processes.

The way my company goes around this is that we currently have a blocking system in place to make sure no script can run for more then x amount of time or eat up x amount of resources.

To monitor whats going on, you can telnet into your server and run top. I'm assuming top is installed by default on your raq, but if it isn't, you can download it from ftp://ftp.groupsys.com/pub/top/.

When you run top, you can see which user is running which process.

Hope that helps.

It definately sounds like something is running away with itself.

Procmon is a wonderful tool for stopping clients using scripts that are gready on resources.

Well, I contacted them and they said they looked at the rest of the sites but can't find anything that is running wrong.

They contacted the place that hosts the servers last week and they have yet to get back to them. He told me that he reboots it to get it straightened out but he doesn't want to keep doing that.