Uptime > 200

Have been getting an apache server error 500 repeatedly over the last few days... tonight I logged in via SSH and when issuing uptime get the following:

06:16:14 up 1 day, 12:30, 7 users, load average: 299.75, 263.58, 237.01
06:18:05 up 1 day, 12:32, 7 users, load average: 280.18, 270.10, 242.50
06:27:15 up 1 day, 12:41, 7 users, load average: 149.65, 140.77, 188.61

As you can see it seems genovese is "struggling" a little.

I've got caching on my WordPress site to help reduce load, but with that sort of load, I'm not sure it is my site to blame.

Any ideas why genovese is struggling like treacle in winter?

Ouch

If you think it's a user causing the problem, who can sometimes help Sherlock the problem down if you're keeping an eye on loads. Support sometimes have to catch a script gone haywire while it's actively running to be certain of the cause.




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Looks like our crack Stability commandos have already been on the scene:

genovese:~# uptime
 12:10:06 up 1 day, 18:24,  8 users,  load average: 8.68, 9.97, 9.69

Ahh, much better!