High server load - Could someone investigate?

Hi,

I'm running a new forum (222 members, 226 threads, 1737 posts - vbulletin version 3.5.4 - vBSEO 2.4.5) on a P4 2.4Ghz Plesk Reloaded server with 1GB RAM.

Everything worked great for a while, but since 2 days, I'm getting high server load peaks of 30+ which cause my server to stop responding. After a while, or after a reboot, the server load is back to normal (below 1).

Could anyone take a look at my server to see if there's anything that should be changed to increase performance?

Thanks,
Leon

Hello Leon,

in my view, you should try to determine the cause of the issue first. Do the load spike emerge at the same time of the day? May be there is a cron job that is executed in background and adds significant load? Try to check your "top" stats at the server to find out which process takes the most resources.

Hi Oleg,

I'll try to do that, although it's a bit difficult because I usually can't connect to the server to do a "top" when I find out the forum is slow.

I'll keep an eye on the scheduled tasks..the high server loads happened in the morning both yesterday and today. I'll quickly login and do a "top" just before the cron jobs start, tomorrow morning.

Ok, looking forward to hearing from you.

It happened again today, around the same time as yesterday and the day before that...so I'm guessing this is because of a cronjob, but I'm not sure which one..

I did find out it's because of a high iowait. Check out the attachment, the serverload is 48 and iowait 95%, while none of the processes are using a lot of CPU or Memory.

I'm trying to find out what's causing it, but I have the feeling it's not vBSEO related?

Yes, taking into account this behaviour, this must be a scheduled task that causes the server load spike.
By the way, if you have vBSEO Sitemap Generator installed, please check vB admincp->Schedule manager and make sure that you have '0' set for "minutes" setting (default value of "*" means running every minute).

Turns out the harddisk was in poor condition..I managed to move the forum to a new server just in time before it crashed.

Thanks again Oleg,
Leon

Ok, great you moved it on time.