High CPU Load

[Jennifer2010]

Hi everyone!

My server has been experiencing extremely high CPU load. Sometimes the Load Averages go above 100.00.

While this happens, spamd fails, chkservd hangs and I now I got an email saying:
Drive Critical: /tmp (/var/tmp) is 100% full
Drive Critical: /usr/tmpDSK (/tmp) is 100% full

My questions are:

How can I see what's filling up these directories and how can I see the size of them?

* X3460 CPU
* 16Gb ram
* 2x1TB drives in software raid 1
* 100mbps port
* Centos 5.8 64 bit
* Standard partitioning (4gb swap, 100mb /boot, remainder /)
* Cpanel / WHM

Thank you

[ruzbehraja]

when this happens or starts happening, login via SSH and run the command:

top -c

paste the output here.

check your mail queue to see if you have a spammer or compromised account.

[cPanelTristan]

A spammer isn't going to fill up /tmp and the reason the load is going crazy is likely due to MySQL filling it up. /tmp is used for PHP sessions and for MySQL MyISAM temporary tables. I've never seen PHP sessions filling it up, but I have seen MySQL doing it a lot.

Check if it's MySQL by running this:

cd /var/lib/mysql
grep -i "incorrect key" hostname.err

Replace hostname.err with the fully qualified hostname of the machine + .err at the end.

If you do see entries for that for /tmp, then MySQL is the cause. You can follow these suggestions to correct that:

http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/drive-cr...tml#post799162

Earlier in that thread, I also mention how to resize /tmp otherwise. I think changing the MySQL tmpdir is a better choice, but it's up to you.