Peak of Load and Process

[Supercerdas]

Hi,

I have a server with Red Hat 9 and Plesk 7.0.3, with 300 Domains, the machine works fine. Xeon Dual , 2 gb, two hdds, Zend Performance Suite, optimization etc etc.. the average of load is 1 or 2 in hours of high activity and processes around 200. all ok but appers peak that hang the machine one minutes until the apache is restaring ...

700 or 800 process, i saw this years ago with 7.3 ,,, any ideas? the mysql process are 3 o 4 at same time, the server load normal and in the error_log of apache i only see segmentation fauls (few) sometimes.

any help or similar expirience?

Thanks

Example of peak :

23:18:19 up 1 day, 2:24, 1 user, load average: 29.80, 19.93, 12.42
1120 processes: 1113 sleeping, 6 running, 1 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU0 states: 2.13% user 4.1% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 93.3% idle
CPU1 states: 1.15% user 1.6% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 96.12% idle
CPU2 states: 2.12% user 1.14% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 95.8% idle
CPU3 states: 2.0% user 1.13% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 96.3% idle
Mem: 2063892k av, 2048312k used, 15580k free, 0k shrd, 34696k buff
1310168k actv, 278712k in_d, 43620k in_c
Swap: 4144760k av, 963388k used, 3181372k free 315800k cached

 

[SupermanInNY]

Try to see if you have mysql running heavy.
I had a client that brought the server to its knees... simply by running a forum (130 concurent users and a massive posting table - A TABLE - in ths size of 670MB).

This was a killer for my server, and I also have the ZPS installed that week. It helped dramatically, the ZPS, but stil it was keeping my CPU at 6.18 to 9.33 at peak times.

Keep in mind that such a forum also kicks emails right and left to users - alerting them of other users' posts.

Check the mysql, it might tell you something.
Also check the my.cnf and verify that it is set perhaps to small instead of the medium or large.

good luck,

-Alon.