Process causing high load - how do I pinpoint it?

Hello,

Hopefully someone can provide me with a not all too complex solution. Last night my server crashed, and I've had nothing but problems trying to sort it today.

Whenever I start apache, processes like this keep building up, and I have no idea what they are - and more importantly, how to remove their presence.

top:

Code: 
 10:13:26  up 49 min,  4 users,  load average: 9.92, 6.97, 3.77
144 processes: 125 sleeping, 17 running, 2 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  cpu    user    nice  system    irq  softirq  iowait    idle
           total   85.4%    0.1%   12.5%   0.1%     1.5%    0.0%    0.0%
Mem:  1030088k av,  905768k used,  124320k free,       0k shrd,  168576k buff
                    466404k actv,  262576k in_d,   13296k in_c
Swap: 2040212k av,    1732k used, 2038480k free                  504484k cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU COMMAND
22405 nobody    25   0  3132 3132  1576 R    23.5  0.3   1:41   0 perl
22442 nobody    25   0  3156 3156  1596 R    23.5  0.3   1:24   0 perl
24911 nobody    25   0  3144 3144  1576 R    23.3  0.3   0:39   0 perl
25265 nobody    25   0  3148 3148  1576 R    21.9  0.3   0:30   0 perl

ps -auwx |grep 22405

nobody 22405 28.4 0.3 7464 3132 ? R 10:06 0:52 /hsphere/shared/apache/bin/httpd -DSSL



Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place for information, but other than it being something to do with a script that information is of no use. I don't even have a directory called /hsphere/ !Process causing high load - how do I pinpoint it? When I shutdown the apache service, eventually all processes like mentioned above timedout and load went back to it's usual sanity. What should I do to track/pinpoint what is causing the problem? I checked the apache status page, and it didn't list any processes under this ID.

Any advice which can be offered would be greatly appreciated.

 

 

 

 

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