server load getting high

HI,

One of our server is getting very high load, how do we find out that who is causing this problem.

Is any command that I can use?

thanks
john

[DanEthical]

Originally Posted by webwebweb

HI,

One of our server is getting very high load, how do we find out that who is causing this problem.

Is any command that I can use?

thanks
john

This could be caused for many reasons such as spam emails being sent, log files being saved on the server, the server could be full etc etc etc....
The best thing to do is contact your server admin or provider and ask them to check into it.
Hope this helps.

Like DanEthical said, it could be a number of issues, it could be something as simple a hanging script. Is there a certain time that your server load goes up or is it all the time?

Last time this happened to me was when a malicious client abused his shell account by compiling IRC bots... He was rather easy to find... try runing a "rootkit" on your server, also, if this is cPanel, go into the root WHM and list all running processes, (Show current Apache / MySQL processes).

Regards,
Christian A. Herrnbock

Hello Webwebweb,

First you will have to log into your server as root. Then first thing you will havbe to do is to type the following commands

#nice top -c

This will show a number of running process which is taking the memory and CPU load

Check the user which is running the process and if it is not root kill that process by kill -9 processid

then if httpd or mysql or exim is taking the load then restart each services

#service httpd restart
#service mysq restart

If you are unaware of all these please contact me at supportmatrix@gmail.com

Regards
SupportMatrix
Senior System Admin

Why not paste your "top -c" output when load is high here?

Also paste the "ps -aux" output here when load is high.

does it have a high IOWait time ? Avoid using kernel 2.6.9-22

What is the server setup and how many domains are on it? For example, what CPU Speed, how much Memory etc

What is the load? Depending on your server specs, a load of even 2+ might not be high.

I have a Dual Xeon 2.8Ghz processor w/ hyper-threading. A load of 4+ is even acceptable.

What is the configuration of the Server and which OS does it run?