Consistent high load and outage at regular intervals

[3bdigital]

We have 2 sites on a VPS and we have been consistently experiencing high load and outages at specific intervals at the same times each day. The WHM is fairly standard, we have not installed anything other than what came out of the box.

Our WHM details:
WHM 11.32.3 (build 21)
CENTOS 6.2 x86_64 kvm on 500311

I have attached a snippet from our pingdom monitoring which shows that the outages are occurring at regular times each day. The times listed below are the approximate intervals

4:17 - 4:21
5:17 - 5:19
8:17 - 8:20
15:16 - 15:18
21:13 - 21:14
23:18 - 23:23

We have taken a look at the logs but are unsure where exactly to look and how to interpret them so any help would be greatly appreciated. We have asked our hosting provider if anything is happening on the KVM host at that time and they seem to think there is nothing that would cause that.

I have attached the sar log because that seemed to have differences that lined up with the intervals.

Thank you in advance for any help

[srpurdy]

Did you check the output of TOP command see whats running and if anything is using an abnormal amount of resources. Also run mysqltuner and tweak. The default cpanel install is no way to run a server. Many options need to be changed not only for performance but security as well.

If you post a mysqltuner report and top output I may be able to help more. (Just remember to remove php process usernames from the top output before posting it on here)

You can also look at cpanel whm in the daily process log it will show whats been using the most resources each day. This may help track down the issue.

I'd also highly suggest installing a software iptables firewall like csf if you haven't already. Which is a free plugin for cpanel. Weed out some bad traffic.