Find cause of high load

[RetiredAF]

On a few occasions we have experienced an huge and brief increase in load on our server (example follows). We'd like to find out what is causing this. If something would just run top and record the results when the load went above a certain level that might be a start. Anybody know how we might do that.

10:00:01 PM runq-sz plist-sz ldavg-1 ldavg-5 ldavg-15
...

11:30:01 PM 10 458 0.53 0.65 0.69
11:40:01 PM 10 458 0.48 0.60 0.63
11:50:40 PM 0 779 172.29 98.67 41.33

 

[GOT]

The best thing to do would be to get alerted when load is high so you can log in and take a look, or better yet leave top running on the server for a while so you don't have to bother logging in.

CSF/LFD has a high load alert it can send out when it sees load is above a certain point.

 

[RetiredAF]

The best thing to do would be to get alerted when load is high so you can log in and take a look, or better yet leave top running on the server for a while so you don't have to bother logging in.

CSF/LFD has a high load alert it can send out when it sees load is above a certain point.

Thanks but so far this has only occurred at night when we are in bed so we were look for someway to automate this.

 

[GOT]

I'm afraid that is not something we have done before as we have detailed monitoring systems that take care of that kind of thing for us. The command to dump the output of top to a file is

top -b -n 1 > top.txt

But you'd have to write a bash script that checked load and then ran that command to dump the output for you. I don't have a ready made solution for that though.

 

[RetiredAF]

I'm afraid that is not something we have done before as we have detailed monitoring systems that take care of that kind of thing for us. The command to dump the output of top to a file is

top -b -n 1 > top.txt

But you'd have to write a bash script that checked load and then ran that command to dump the output for you. I don't have a ready made solution for that though.

Thanks again. Actually your mention of CSF/LFD got me looking in that direction and I think this might be what I was looking for.
webhostpython.com/billing/knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&id=66

 

[cPanelLauren]

We also have the following tutorial which might be useful: Tutorial - Troubleshooting high server loads on Linux servers