Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Daily high load

[cuantica]

Hello, I am having trouble finding the origin of an almost daily high server load at similar hours.

Here is the ps output I got from last 2 days, how can I find what user / process is causing such behavior. Any guidelines very appreciated.

[ub3r]

What is the load, and during what time do you notice the high load?

[cuantica]

It was

Time: Thu Apr 24 15:11:12 2008
1 Min Load Avg: 14.13
5 Min Load Avg: 6.29
15 Min Load Avg: 3.50
Running/Total Processes: 1/373

Time: Wed Apr 23 16:24:52 2008
1 Min Load Avg: 12.79
5 Min Load Avg: 6.39
15 Min Load Avg: 5.95
Running/Total Processes: 2/418

[husaren]

man top might be worth a look..

[jalapeno55]

Try
netstat -an |grep FIN

[scamp81]

Spamd/clamd can be huge resource hogs if you get a lot of email. Try restarting them when you have high load. From the averages, it looks like load is already on it's way down when you are looking at it. So even though ps doesn't show a high usage, for the processes they could have already been hit. Also how large are your mail q's. Huge q's can cause load problems.

[ub3r]

Originally Posted by husaren

man top might be worth a look..

Don't post here. He's already provided ps output.

[cuantica]

Originally Posted by ub3r

Don't post here. He's already provided ps output.

that is fine ub3r, especially I am looking for guidelines that would help me to trace this problem at the same time I got better understanding about the way I should deal with. Any advice is welcome.

[cuantica]

any other suggestions? thanks.

[cuantica]

Same problem today, here is top output during a peak load

Time: Mon Apr 28 11:16:51 2008
1 Min Load Avg: 27.64
5 Min Load Avg: 12.11
15 Min Load Avg: 5.41
Running/Total Processes: 7/452

[tix3]

I can see that horde is using 35% of your cpu.
Thats an odd thing.I remember there was an exploit at horde in cpanel lately but i really doubt this is the issue.

[crazor]

That would doubtly be the problem.

It's loads of people sending requests to the email server at once, having a high cpu isn't too bad though.

If you see laggyness of your server then i'd suggest you upgrade. However 15% load shouldn't be too much of a problem at all..

Apart from that its just the means of a highly used Server

[ub3r]

run these commands & send output

free -m

dmesg | tail -n 20