Can anyone please help me make sense of this?

My site is very slow reaching almost 100% CPU; through shell i found this. But i don't know what these means. How can i relate the PID with specific files? Any help will be highly appreciated.

[root@dedicated ~]# top
top - 15:55:37 up 26 days, 13:41, 2 users, load average: 42.93, 42.98, 42.98
Tasks: 376 total, 43 running, 332 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu(s): 98.7% us, 1.3% sy, 0.0% ni, 0.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 514924k total, 501824k used, 13100k free, 22728k buffers
Swap: 2096472k total, 886580k used, 1209892k free, 61708k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
814 apache 25 0 23812 8024 3668 R 3.6 1.6 4:59.57 httpd
11254 apache 25 0 23820 4604 3728 R 3.3 0.9 76:11.60 httpd
16227 apache 25 0 24336 4844 3976 R 3.3 0.9 24:15.46 httpd
19609 apache 25 0 23832 4612 3724 R 3.3 0.9 34:34.90 httpd
20591 apache 25 0 23872 4664 3792 R 3.3 0.9 26:51.95 httpd
22710 apache 25 0 23752 4648 3772 R 3.3 0.9 25:27.06 httpd
22736 apache 25 0 23880 4608 3732 R 3.3 0.9 19:28.81 httpd
23703 apache 25 0 23856 4664 3788 R 3.3 0.9 23:32.68 httpd
24618 apache 25 0 23912 4660 3792 R 3.3 0.9 16:13.84 httpd
26777 apache 25 0 23848 4592 3724 R 3.3 0.9 18:02.03 httpd
29543 apache 25 0 23892 4608 3732 R 3.3 0.9 17:04.23 httpd
949 apache 25 0 23872 4596 3712 R 3.3 0.9 14:50.28 httpd
1333 apache 25 0 23844 4596 3720 R 3.3 0.9 14:32.26 httpd
2716 apache 25 0 23772 4524 3608 R 3.3 0.9 13:57.96 httpd
2968 apache 25 0 23804 4592 3700 R 3.3 0.9 13:46.46 httpd
3376 apache 25 0 23924 4608 3732 R 3.3 0.9 12:24.16 httpd
3823 apache 25 0 23916 4660 3784 R 3.3 0.9 12:51.87 httpd
4998 apache 25 0 23884 5128 3760 R 3.3 1.0 12:39.09 httpd
6023 apache 25 0 23924 4684 3820 R 3.3 0.9 11:47.81 httpd
6926 apache 25 0 23964 4676 3800 R 3.3 0.9 11:43.23 httpd
7119 apache 25 0 23904 4648 3768 R 3.3 0.9 11:50.71 httpd
8802 apache 25 0 23900 4604 3728 R 3.3 0.9 11:06.53 httpd
10395 apache 25 0 23812 4572 3672 R 3.3 0.9 10:52.72 httpd
29982 apache 25 0 23920 6328 3792 R 3.3 1.2 5:11.56 httpd
32270 apache 25 0 23828 5340 3680 R 3.3 1.0 5:12.20 httpd
495 apache 25 0 23932 8212 3724 R 3.3 1.6 4:57.64 httpd
1330 apache 25 0 23928 8196 3688 R 3.3 1.6 4:56.35 httpd
1801 apache 25 0 23756 7760 3592 R 3.3 1.5 4:50.04 httpd
1965 apache 25 0 23832 8212 3780 R 3.3 1.6 4:32.50 httpd
25889 apache 25 0 23964 7764 3800 R 2.0 1.5 5:23.91 httpd
1252 root 17 0 2908 1080 732 S 0.7 0.2 6:49.99 top
25869 root 17 0 3164 1148 760 R 0.3 0.2 0:04.83 top
1 root 16 0 2456 464 436 S 0.0 0.1 0:03.83 init
2 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.38 ksoftirqd/0
3 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.32 events/0
4 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 khelper
5 root 15 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid
19 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.06 kblockd/0
40 root 12 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0

 

Which version of apache are you running ? (type httpd --version)

The culprit is apache spawning too much child processes that remain spare(inactive) even when they are not in use...(MaxSpareServers in httpd.conf)

Also seems to me that an old version of apache causing memory leaks...

 

yaar, apache version is 2.0.59

how do i fix them?

 

Most probably you have something like the infinite cycle somewhere in your PHP code thus you should check the code which you have placed on the site just prior to this CPU usage surge.