Server load problem

[dendrob]

I've been having some major server issues and cannot figure out what the cause is. My forum/site will work perfectly fine for say 2 days, then all of the sudden the load will go through the roof and the server will become pretty much unusable. It seems that it may be something to do with mysql, as all the simple html still show up, but mysql pages time out.

I'm running a dedicated host with 2gb of RAM. How could I troubleshoot and figure out what the cause of the high load is... 'top', doesn't really show anything useful. Is there some type of a debugging tool for mysql?

any help would be appreciated..this is causing me some major grief
Thanks

[Wayne Luke]

If you are on a dedicated server I would advise that you request server optimization help by starting a thread in the Server Configuration forum supplying the information requested in this thread:

http://www.vbulletin.com/go/tweak

This is not an official service so the response may not be as fast.