503 Service Temporarily Unavailable Intermittent Issue - Site hangs

Hi guys

I was wondering if you can help me troubleshoot an intermittent "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable". I think it may be related to my fcgid configuration.

My site has vBulletin and has been working great for months now. I installed wordpress yesterday in a seperate directory

Problem: My site will be running fine, and then every 10-15 minutes or so (although sometimes quicker or slower than this), all of a sudden it wont respond to any requests, just sits there loading, but only for about 3-4 minutes, then I'm presented with the "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable". Then when I refresh, it's back to normal in about 5 minutes.

Happens on my vBulletin page, as well as Wordpress page. I can access my cPanel however, I think this is because cPanel isn't served by Apache yes?

Nonetheless here are the server specs/config:

WHM 11.32.5 (build 11)
CENTOS 5.8 x86_64 vmware

Apache 2.2.22
PHP 5.3.10
MySQL 5.x

CPU: 2 vCPUs
RAM: 4 GB

php -v

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/rebuild_phpconf --current

Apache >> Include Editor >> Pre Virtual Host Include (from WHM)
(contains some fcgid config)

Is the above fcgid config the issue?

Extra Info:
At the time of the hang, memory and swap usage, as well as CPU usage seems to be fine. However I may be checking the wrong thing so I will gladly take any advice!



Would appreciate any advice, thank you!

 

Ok i've looked in the Apache error_log and this is what I see during/near the time the site is freezing up:

About 20 or so of these:

And lots of these too:

This is followed by an apache restart which would explain the downtime:

Any ideas?

 

It just happened again, but only after an hour or so.

I altered

and it seemed to improve after that. But still hung.

So if this is the correct setting i'm fiddling with, what's the ideal value for " FcgidMaxProcessesPerClass" and FcgidIdleTimeout ?

Many thanks

 

Hi guys. Didn't get any of these until just now, got one 503 error:

/http://saved.im/mtg4oti5yjd0/503servicetempunavailerror.png

What does one do to try and troubleshoot such an error (site is fine now by the way, but I want to know what is causing this).

Many thanks