How to lower my high resource utilization?

[Mateo1041]

Hello,

Our VPS is having some high system usage issues where many times it's in the 90% range. How can I lower this?

Our web host suggested disabling "named" and "entropy" services. I found I can do this right from the System Services Virtuozzo section. Is it safe to disable "named"?

What else can I do?

Thanks,
- Matt.

 

[Mateo1041]

Just wanted to check in again regarding this. Are there services I can disable to free up memory? Aside from disabling services, the other thing my web host suggested is to double check that MySQL database calls are being closed properly. But they should be.

Is it common for a VPS with only one website to be at 90% resource usage?

 

[danliker]

you need to send more information, like top or something ....

 

[Mateo1041]

No problem. VPS is Linux FC 4. Description is "HMS configuration file for 256 MB (384 MB) of memory."

CPU usage is 0%. System usage is 82.52%. Disk space is 34.85%. Network usage is 0.02%.

Top:

top - 12:05:36 up 11:50,  1 user,  load average: 0.01, 0.01, 0.00
Tasks:  26 total,   1 running,  25 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.0% us,  0.1% sy,  0.0% ni, 99.9% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:   8299612k total,  8222968k used,    76644k free,   517660k buffers
Swap:  2040244k total,     3192k used,  2037052k free,  4970836k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
    1 root      16   0  1672  628 1472 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.10 init
 6011 root      16   0  1548  620 1372 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.06 syslogd
 6029 named     20   0 30348 3144 4968 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 named
 6042 root      16   0  4316 1732 3940 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 sshd
 6050 root      16   0  2096  936 1764 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.11 xinetd
 6111 root      17   0  2228 1136 2036 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 mysqld_safe
 7174 mysql     16   0 86648  14m  10m S  0.0  0.2   0:00.18 mysqld
 7242 qmails    16   0  1520  412 1336 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.05 qmail-send
 7244 qmaill    16   0  1476  460 1304 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 splogger
 7245 root      18   0  1504  360 1312 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 qmail-lspawn
 7246 qmailr    15   0  1500  388 1308 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 qmail-rspawn
 7247 qmailq    15   0  1468  348 1304 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 qmail-clean
 7271 root      16   0 33540  14m  26m S  0.0  0.2   0:00.45 httpd
 7333 root      18   0 19240 9008  15m S  0.0  0.1   0:00.00 httpd
 7349 apache    15   0 40104  22m  26m S  0.0  0.3   0:30.07 httpd
 7360 root      16   0 48020 5540  45m S  0.0  0.1   0:00.04 httpsd
 7369 psaadm    17   0 48020 5528  45m S  0.0  0.1   0:00.00 httpsd

System services:

	crond 	Running 	Yes
	httpd 	Running 	Yes
	iptables 	Running 	Yes
	mysqld 	Running 	Yes
	named 	Running 	Yes
	psa 	Running 	Yes
	qmail 	Running 	Yes
	smb 	Stopped 	No
	sshd 	Running 	Yes
	syslog 	Running 	Yes
	xinetd

System processes:

1 	0.0 	0.0 	init 	0 	23 	628 	S 	00:00:00 	0
	3783 	0.1 	0.2 	/usr/sbin/httpd 	0 	24 	23212 	S 	00:00:10 	48
	6011 	0.0 	0.0 	syslogd -m 0 	0 	23 	620 	S 	00:00:00 	0
	6029 	0.0 	0.0 	/usr/sbin/named -u named -n1 -c /etc/named.conf -u named -t /var/named/run-root 	0 	19 	3148 	S 	00:00:00 	25
	6042 	0.0 	0.0 	/usr/sbin/sshd 	0 	23 	1732 	S 	00:00:00 	0
	6050 	0.0 	0.0 	xinetd -stayalive -pidfile /var/run/xinetd.pid 	0 	23 	936 	S 	00:00:00 	0
	6111 	0.0 	0.0 	/bin/sh /usr/bin/mysqld_safe --defaults-file=/etc/my.cnf --pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid 	0 	22 	1136 	S 	00:00:00 	0
	7174 	0.0 	0.1 	/usr/libexec/mysqld --defaults-file=/etc/my.cnf --basedir=/usr --datadir=/var/lib/mysql --user=mysql --pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid --skip-locking --socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock 	0 	23 	15056 	S 	00:00:00 	27
	7242 	0.0 	0.0 	qmail-send 	0 	23 	412 	S 	00:00:00 	2522
	7244 	0.0 	0.0 	splogger qmail 	0 	23 	460 	S 	00:00:00 	2022
	7245 	0.0 	0.0 	qmail-lspawn ./Maildir/ 	0 	21 	360 	S 	00:00:00 	0
	7246 	0.0 	0.0 	qmail-rspawn 	0 	24 	388 	S 	00:00:00 	2521
	7247 	0.0 	0.0 	qmail-clean 	0 	24 	348 	S 	00:00:00 	2520
	7271 	0.0 	0.1 	/usr/sbin/httpd 	0 	23 	15352 	S 	00:00:00 	0
	7333 	0.0 	0.1 	/usr/sbin/httpd 	0 	21 	9008 	S 	00:00:00 	0
	7349 	0.0 	0.2 	/usr/sbin/httpd 	0 	24 	22992 	S 	00:00:32 	48
	7360 	0.0 	0.0 	/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/httpsd 	0 	23 	5540 	S 	00:00:00 	0
	7369 	0.0 	0.0 	/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/httpsd 	0 	22 	5528 	S 	00:00:00 	2523
	7392 	0.0 	0.0 	crond 	0 	23 	1072 	S 	00:00:00 	0
	7399 	0.0 	0.0 	/usr/sbin/saslauthd -m /var/run/saslauthd -a pam -n 1 	0 	21 	1256 	S 	00:00:00 	0
	7482 	0.0 	0.2 	/usr/sbin/httpd 	0 	23 	23072 	S 	00:00:28 	48
	13354 	0.0 	0.2 	/usr/sbin/httpd 	0 	23 	23040 	S 	00:00:14 	48
	28360 	0.0 	0.0 	sshd: root@ttyp0 	0 	24 	2660 	S 	00:00:00 	0
	28416 	0.0 	0.0 	-bash 	0 	23 	1316 	S 	00:00:00 	0
	29719 	0.0 	0.2 	/usr/sbin/httpd 	0 	24 	23204 	S 	00:00:27 	48

 

[NightStorm]

Wait... your host suggested to disable the DNS service on your box...?
Entropy is a chat service... not necessary to make things run.

From what I can see, your system appears to be running fine, though. The line that I would be watching would be this one:

load average: 0.01, 0.01, 0.00

. That's extremely low, making it very much within the acceptable limits. What's the highest you have seen your load get, and what was running at that time?

 

[Mateo1041]

Yes, my host's exact words were:

It does appear that your VPS has a high resource utilization. Unfortunately, you will have to login using SSH and see what processes are running on the server, and disable any non-essential services, such as entropy, named, etc, and ensure that any MySQL calls are being closed properly in the code of your sites.

I am afraid the statistics you are seeing are server-wide. This means that they are statistics for every VPS on the same machine. So the percents are of ALL of the resources on the machine. Since you have a small portion of all of the resources the percents are low. Also, the command 'top' may show you the stats in near real-time. Hopefully, this information helps you a little better.

My "System usage" gauge under Virtuozzo is the thing I need to watch or else things slow to a crawl. Right now it's consistently around 80-90% which is fairly high. That's why I'm wondering how to decrease it. A sample of what's running is provided under the "System processes" section I posted before.

Thanks for your help so far. I really appreciate it.

 

[Mateo1041]

Anyone else have any ideas?