Sudden high CPU utilization

[Martin Blank]

Starting on Wednesday afternoon, my server started to register high CPU utilization. It went from its former average of 15% to about 50%. Load average has gone from 0.6 on average to 3.0. I've run chkrootkit and restarted several services (httpd, mysqld, clamav, iworx, etc), but I have not seen this decrease. No updates were installed on that day.

Any suggestions on where else to look?

[Justec]

Did you try using SSH and doing 'top' to see what is using the CPU?
Also, have you tried just rebooting the whole server instead of just the services themselves?

[Martin Blank]

Didn't see much usage via top. httpd is occasionally using a combined 15% or so of the processor, very occasionally going to 25%, but nothing significant. Shutting down httpd and mysqld dropped the load by about 0.6. I ran chkrootkit, but it found nothing. Rebooting is kind of a last resort; I also have an IRC service running, and rebooting tends to annoy users. Besides, if I reboot and it goes away, that does little to answer the question of what started it.

[juangake]

Hello Martin.

Take a look at this post I published some time ago about a workaround that worked for me on that situation:

http://www.sagonet.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2316

You'll have to restart apache after these changes of course.

Regards,

Juan