Backup Overloads & Crashes Server

[davetanguay]

I have 2 CPanel servers that are having this problem. The load is normal throughout the day (average is 1-3) but when backups start to running the load goes up to 20 sometimes 50. It crashes HTTP, MySQL & when I try to access WHM it returns INTERNAL SERVER ERROR. I am running the following:

cPanel 11.24.4-S33345 - WHM 11.24.2 - X 3.9
REDHAT Enterprise 4 i686 on standard

This is a quad core intel xeon with 4GB RAM and 2 250GB drives. The secondary drive is the backup drive.

When I check top it shows gtar is using 90-100% CPU.

I even had this problem when I tried moving a site to the server. I tried to use the cpmove feature within WHM on a 5GB site and it brought down HTTP. I then tried to just zip up the /public_html on the old server, FTP'd the file to the new account on my server. Then when I unzipped the 5GB file it crashed HTTP and MySQL. I can't even decompress large files without the server crashing.

Any ideas?