Why such high load?

Hi everyone

I've been running my own dedicated servers for a couple of years now with eveything going well.

I've had a new box up and running for about 6 weeks and it's all good apart from the load keeps ramping up and down throughout the day.

There are only about 6 low traffic sites on the server, with only a couple using PHP/MySQL. The rest are static.

The load has been going up to about 2 every so often, with no obvious pattern. Earlier I happened to check the load and it was up to 4. I checked top, but whatever had done it had stopped and the load was on it's way back down.

Spec:
- 850MHz Celeron
- 128MB ram
- 20GB 7200 disk

I've got a script checking the load every minute which will page me if it goes over 2, but every time I get to the server the process has stopped.

I also tried setting the same script to email me the top processes at the same time, but still nothing showed up Why such high load?

Here's the load info from the one I caught earlier:

4:01pm up 18 days, 16:42, 0 users, load average: 3.83, 1.53, 0.77
206 processes: 202 sleeping, 4 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 2.0% user, 0.9% system, 0.5% nice, 0.6% idle
Mem: 125352K av, 94040K used, 31312K free, 0K shrd, 4476K buff
Swap: 1052216K av, 173204K used, 879012K free 16988K cached

I'm running MRTG which is monitoring all sorts. Nothing else seems to peak at the same time as the load.

Any ideas?!

Matt

 

 

 

 

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