I run my VPS with linode.com since a few years back. It has been working pretty well, and then suddenly at the end of last month, linode sent 7 emails to me saying CPU usage had exceeded the notification threshold together with 7 other emails saying inbound traffic has the same issue. Well as I logged in, I found that one process had used 400% CPU, and the traffic was 10 times as high as usual. I knew this was impossible as I only got only a few hundred visitors daily. So I finally checked the process via SSH and found one process HTTPD took 100% CPU and there was no way I could kill it. So I reboot my VPS and it all resumed to normal usage. But the problem isn't solved. Today I got 5 same Emails from Linode, and the issues was solved by rebooting it. But I want to know what could cause this? I got Linode 512 as a web server and installed standard LAMP, the OS is CentOS, and I run only Wordpress, all 3.2, about 4 blogs with visitors less than 1000 daily in total. Thanks.
It could be a few things. It could be your web server getting attacked or it could be a script running on your server making your httpd process sky rocket. There are other possibilities but hard to say for sure without looking into it. Look in your logs and see if there was anything unusual around the times it started happening. Good Luck!
Hi, thanks for the suggestions. I do not think anyone should attack my blog, so I may check my scripts and upgrade them.
You can also try optimizing the server , or install nginx it can hold it up well , otherwise if you want any help drop me an PM i'll do for free.