Wow, I apologize for being vague and demanding, I have an earnest desire to learn, and I hope that my learning will benefit others.

Let me try to approach this problem again:

I was hoping that someone could point me in the direction of some helpful ways to analyze this (Centos 4.3) system. It was acting very strangely yesterday. I received emails complaining that: - none of the links were working (it was a vague complaint) - the javascript version of our RSS feed had a 14 second load time ( http://www.insurancejournal.com/newsfeed/feed.php )

I have never had to track down a problem like this and i have spent a good deal of the morning looking into options for the 'top' command, (because i had read in a Novel book that it was useful for diagnosing bottlenecks). I saw that there were a lot of mysql and httpd processes going, but i figured that was just lots of people visiting the site, or editors working on stories.

After not being able to find anything helpful (that i could take action on), I ended up trying the vmstat command (got the idea here: http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-resource-utilization-to-detect-system-bo...).

The websites are set up to have their own log files, which are quite numerous so I ran the command:

find . -type f -printf '%TY-%Tm-%Td %TT %p\n' | sort |less

from the logfiles directory to see which one has been modified last, then I looked at the most recent logfile with a 'tail -f' and saw that it was being written incredibly fast.

the repeating error was: File does not exist: /var/www/www.insurancejournal.com/web/news

it was my understanding that this was not a directory and it was just done through some sort of URL re-write.

Continuing to try to trouble shoot the issue i created the news directory. The error then changed to: File does not exist: /var/www/www.insurancejournal.com/web/news/east File does not exist: /var/www/www.insurancejournal.com/web/news/west and so on. Part of the reason for re-writing URLS (at least one reason I like it) it that you can make one PHP file look like a ton of HTML files. I could see that something is likely to be wrong with the re-write system, but I am wondering what suggestions (tools) some of the 'more seasoned' system admins might have to help me track down this issue or even a better approach to problem solving.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

Many Thanks

Walt Reed wrote:

On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 09:36:08AM -0800, Administrator said:

...

Yesterday our website was acting a little odd, and i received a few email complaints. Running 'top' showed that we had a very high load average, today the load average is even higher!

load average: 13.18, 12.49, 10.48

It is pretty unlikely that our site grew in popularity that quickly, and taking a look at the log file it was saying that a certain directory was not found, when in fact it was just a mod-re-write rule and was not supposed to exist. The website works fine... i am stumped and the error log is getting quite big! Does anyone have any tips on how to find the problem and address it accordingly (quickly)? Many thanks

Patient: Doctor, I am ill, but I can't tell you any details. What can I do to feel better?

Doctor: Well, it would be helpful if you give me some more details, or I could ask you about 10,000 questions and we can be here all month...

Seriously, please read: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/smart-questions.html

Then look at your log files. The contents will probably give you your answer anyway.

Thanks. _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos