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Community ▶ Questions ▶ What may be causing IO spikes?
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What may be causing IO spikes?

performance

Hi Guys,

I have a 720 linode which at regular period spikes on CPU usage and IO usage (but not network traffic). How do I know which process is causing such spike? The spike is semi-regular (though not perfectly predictable) though I do get one such spike per day.

I am attaching the sceenshot of one such spike here http://i42.tinypic.com/255jayb.jpg

I have a daily backup process which runs once daily. But the timing of the spike doesn't match exactly with it. What could be causing such a spike? Any clue.

Thanks.

7 Replies

Log rotation maybe?

Any clue how to diagnose whether it is indeed log rotation and how to fix it?

If it is indeed log rotation, which seems reasonable, then there's not really a problem to be fixed.

You can test by simply disabling log rotation for a few days.

Looks like log rotation, you should google around for server monitoring software, they can often email you when the load spikes with details of what's running.

I had exactly the same problem as of two days ago - I'll update this post with the outcome.

So far, disabling the logrotate cron temporarily fixed the problem - now to track down what is actually happening.

–-

[edit]

So I tried running logrotate - /usr/sbin/logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.conf and it finished very quickly… as in < 2 seconds. Now I'm confused…

So I've installed Munin along with the multimemory plugin and re-enabled the logrotate cron. I guess I'll have to wait and see tomorrow…

Hi

Did you solve your problem ? I'm having the same problems with random IO spikes, or CPU spikes.

greg

@EtherealMind:

Hi

Did you solve your problem ? I'm having the same problems with random IO spikes, or CPU spikes.

greg

Which one? Or do you mean both?

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