At the bottom of this message is an extract from the monitoring system for the LUV server. Load average spikes to over 20, but at the time of monitoring there was only 1 D state process and nothing was using much CPU time or much RAM. At the same time other VMs didn't report high load so it wasn't an issue of the disk capacity of the hardware being saturated (which would be difficult for a RAID array of SSDs on a mostly quiet server). 09:55:01 CPU %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 12:35:02 all 4.28 0.00 1.15 17.87 1.40 75.29 12:45:01 all 4.82 0.00 1.54 17.73 1.57 74.35 12:55:01 all 5.00 0.00 1.20 18.15 0.91 74.75 13:05:01 all 5.60 0.00 1.33 17.79 1.00 74.28 13:15:01 all 14.11 0.00 2.70 16.95 1.56 64.69 13:25:01 all 4.21 0.00 1.52 20.83 0.89 72.56 Average: all 5.15 0.00 1.31 19.99 1.09 72.45 Above is part of the sar output. Note that at around the time of the high load average there was a higher than usual amount of user CPU time. The iowait while not correlated with this issue was higher than I expected, I ran "iotop -o -d5 -b -P" which indicated that writes from mysqld was the main disk access. I ran "fatrace -f W" which indicated that mysqld was writing to deleted files in /tmp. | 68991 | luv_drupal | localhost | luv_drupal | Query | 0 | Creating sort index | SELECT v.vid, v.*, n.type FROM vocabulary v LEFT JOIN vocabulary_node_types n ON v.vid = n.vid WHERE | The only time I caught an access with the "show processlist;" SQL command was the above, might "Creating sort index" mean writing to deleted files in /tmp? ALERT itmustbe/loadavg: 21.27 6.84 3.01 >= 7 5 4 (Wed May 13 13:06:39) Summary output : 21.27 6.84 3.01 >= 7 5 4 Detailed text (if any) follows: ------------------------------- Here are D state processes: USER PID VSZ RSS TTY COMMAND root 157 0B 0B [jbd2/vda-8] Here are processes with the top CPU percentages: USER PID CPU TTY COMMAND mon 1630 7.0 /usr/bin/perl /usr/lib/mon/mon-local.d/ loadavg.monitor 7 5 4 mon 1629 6.0 /usr/bin/perl /usr/lib/mon/mon.d/msql- mysql.monitor --mode m www-data 1445 5.1 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start Here are processes with the top RAM use: USER PID VIRT RES TTY COMMAND clamav 335 1.12GB 874MB /usr/sbin/clamd --foreground=true mysql 1392 1.7GB 613MB /usr/sbin/mysqld --basedir=/usr -- datadir=/var/lib/mysql --p spamassassin 20347 101MB 89.3MB spamd child spamassassin 29351 97MB 84.9MB spamd child root 1047 94.5MB 84.1MB /usr/bin/perl -T -w /usr/sbin/spamd -d --pidfile=/var/run/sp Swap Used: 7.8MB / 256MB -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/