[CentOS] Tracking down whats causing a high load?

[Will McDonald]

On 21/06/06, Ian mu <mu.llamas at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just hoping someone may have some tips on checking whats always waiting or
> how to isolate whats happening. As said, ps -ef shows no new processes, and
> cpu usage is very low.

top
vmstat 5

... would be two good places to start. 4am sounds like about the time
jobs from /etc/cron.daily would kick off.

[root at willspc ~]# grep cron.daily /etc/crontab
02 4 * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.daily

Have a look and see what's in cron.daily. On a recently built minimal
install I have...

00-logwatch         0anacron   prelink  slocate.cron  yum.cron
00-makewhatis.cron  logrotate  rpm      tmpwatch

It could just be updatedb building your slocate database? (Check
/etc/updatedb.conf for DAILY_UPDATE= ).

Will.