Extremely high load averages

I am attempting to get to the bottom of a problem I have with one of my clients servers. The background is that this client has 2 managed servers, both Redhat ES2 2.4Ghz 512mb ram, one is used as a web server running apache 2.0.55 php 5.0.5 the second server is not publically accessable and is just used as a mysql database server running mysql 4.1.13-max. There are 4 websites on the servers serving about 3 million page impressions a month.

The web server typically sits at a load average of 0.40 - 0.70, but 4 times now, we have seen the load average sky rocket to 120+ when this happens obviously the server becomes totally unresponsive, at the same time MySQL (different server) report (too many connections) the only way to get the server back is to reboot or if you are luccky enough to get an ssh session to open and able to type the apache restart command, restarting apache fixes the problem.

I have checked all scripts for rogue set_time_limit calls. I am basically looking for suggestions to help trace the root of the problem. I have checked apache logs.

 

 

 

 

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