Troubleshooting CPU utilization spikes

[Chris-777]

Here's my server this morning.. Nothing's changed for quite some time, running the latest 3.x. It's a dedicated server that I underutilize (dual core, plenty of memory) - I had about 200 online when this hit me.

Every so often, my usage will spike WAY up, and this morning it's so high that I can't even execute a simple folder listing in a shell.

The last communication I got from the box was that the MySQL service was off the chart. Where do I begin troubleshooting something like this? It's intermittent, and usually only happens early in the AM. I don't have many plugins running, no custom stuff, and as I said - my actual utilization is much lower than my server is prepared for.

[Chris-777]

I think this may be some kind of record.

[BirdOPrey5]

See if you can find if any of the spikes coincide with the times any scheduled tasks were run. You can check the scheduled task log in Admin CP to see the times they have run.

[Chris-777]

Thanks for the reply.

That's the first thing I checked. I had nothing running at the time, but just for kicks I disabled all custom tasks for a few days to see if it still happened. Unfortunately, I still get weird spikes at odd intervals throughout the day.

I did a backup/restore of my DB to a fresh one, optimized and repaired, and from what I can tell there are no odd tables or outright broken bits of my database. I had a load average of around 30-40 this morning (my usual average is something like 0.5), and while that made my server almost DOA, I was able to get in and disable all of my plugins/hooks to see if that did anything. No change there, unfortunately. :\