Health Monitor

[Shawn M]

Hi,

I get an email two or 3 times a day that my CPU usage goes from green to red.

How can I find the cause of why it went to red?

 

[BoiseComputer]

CPU Usage

First I would look to see if they e-mails are coming it at consistent times. If so you could look at your cron jobs on the server to see if a certain job is running at those times. If the times are consistent I would run the "top" command and see what is running with high processor usage.

 

[Shawn M]

Can you please give me an example of how I would run the TOP command?

 

[BoiseComputer]

Logon to your terminal console using SSH. When there just type top. You should be able to logon to the console with root access somehow.

 

[Shawn M]

I logged in with root access and used "top". How can I look back in the history to find out what caused that spike?

I think it just showed the real time current stats.

 

[BoiseComputer]

There is a utility called "atop". It may not be installed by default though. If you are on a 32 bit system you could install it using "rpm -Uvh http://3es.atomicrocketturtle.com/packages/atop/atop-1.23-8.art.i386.rpm" This ustility shows overall processor usage of programs over time.

 

[Shawn M]

Hi, When I went to install that utility, I got this error:

libtinfo.so.5 is needed by atop-1.23-8.art.i386

What does that mean?

 

[BoiseComputer]

What operating system are you running? CentOS? You need ncurses-libs to be installed. If you are using CentOS you could try running "yum install ncurses-libs"

 

[Shawn M]

I have Cent OS 5.4. I ran it and this is what I got.

Excluding Packages from CentOS-5 - Addons
Finished
Excluding Packages from CentOS-5 - Base
Finished
Excluding Packages from CentOS-5 - Extras
Finished
Excluding Packages from CentOS-5 - Updates
Finished
Setting up Install Process
No package ncurses-libs available.
Nothing to do

 

[BoiseComputer]

Sorry about the delay in response. I did a little research on TOP and found that it will do what you want.

Press shift-a to have it show you the processes using the most CPU over time.