My Excessive Server Load
 

I wake up this morning to find my site was removed due to Excessive Server Loads.

My account has been re-opened so that I can make adjustments to correct this, however, I need some mighty guru know how to get me through this. This is all the info I have recieved:
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planetquintessa.com 4.13 0.45 0.0

Top Process
%CPU 0.2
httpd [cecilcountyx.planetquintessa.com] [/forums/cron.php?&rand498971]

Top Process
%CPU 0.1
httpd [cecilcountyx.planetquintessa.com] [/forums/cpstyles/vBulletin_3_Default/cp_help.gif]
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I have not ever had this problem before so I have no idea what to do. I do not have a huge site but has undergone several upgrades and such.

The site is shared on a server with another site that has been closed (should I remove that databse if not being used?)

My server is Flux Services.

.2 and .1 % is not excessive load...

Altho 4.13 could be.


Sounds like you had a big burst of traffic, its possible you used extra cpu and resources during a backup :/

What sort of stats does your site have? How many users online on average? Peak? Posts? Threads? Hacks?

I did recently do a backup with the board closed. Recently I added a style from the free styles forum, a fancy X-mas theme with added java for the snow effect. Other then that I just recently upgraded to 3.5.2.

Site gets about 1200 pages hits a day
average users online about 17 (guest, bots & members)
Most ever online 113, 06-29 (nothing big recently)

Hacks, I have plenty a handful from 3.0.7 that I havent removed but at the moment nothing active except journals and they just have 3 entries.

with those sorts of stats I don't see how you could be possible using a load of above 1

Your host is trying to single you out because they don't know what they are talking about :(

Delete your Apache Log files. ;)

When they get too large, they make Apache eat up resources for no reason. A gif file should have no appreciable CPU load since isn't dynamic and the browser only needs to request it once ever.

If you can't delete them directly, ask your host to delete them and make sure they don't get up to the 2 GB limit.

How would one go about finding and deleting the Apache Log files?

EDIT: Duh you said it right there :p

If any of your hacks use the AJAX system, such as vBShout for vB3.5, they could be your culprit. AJAX by nature, is very server intensive, because it has to make 13 separate transactions for each update to EVERY client. This article from IBM explains this process rather well: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerwork...=dgr-JavaMVP02

I had to remove the awesome vBShout from my site because of the loads that it was placing on our shared server, and our host kept shutting us down, because we were lagging all the other sites that were on the same server.