Help with MYSQL causing high load

Every day or two my server starts building load. I've been on the server in SSH watching it once or twice when it happens. One minute everything's fine, then it just starts building load.. ramping up until I stop and restart MySQL then it goes back down.

The server is a 1.7 celeron with 512mb of ram running RHE 3.0. I've went through several forums and created a my.cnf file for it thinking that optimization was the problem. This didn't help at all. The server still has the problem and will build load until you kill mysql or reboot it. Sometimes it's so bad I can't even get in with SSH and have to put in a request to reboot the machine.

There's only a handful of sites on the server.. nothing that would put a huge load on things. I have one PHPBB forum that has 30ish people on at the busiest times.. and there's one or two other forums on there, all running phpbb that maybe have 2 or 3 people on at all times. Hardly a situation that would stress a server. When it's running normally and mysql isn't all screwy, it runs at very low load.

Any ideas what to do? Mysql was installed with an RPM if that helps anything. Yeah I know I should compile it myself but I couldn't get MySql and PHP to work together and I ran out of time so RPM it was. If you need me to post any information, tell me and I'll get it up here.

thanks

 

 

 

 

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