I'm seriously in need of help. My sites are now nearly impossible to use because of massive loads on my server. I'm already a month late on my mortgage and this really isn't helping my situation. I've been working on fixing this intermittent load problem for months (never this bad).

I'm suspecting some kind of attack since I'm under DDOS attack a lot! I've been trying to figure out what is causing the load but I'm afraid I just don't have the experience or knowledge to understand all the data I've been looking at. I don't even know where to begin or how to test for the large array of attacks out there.

Here's some data you might find useful...

Server: Xeon X3220 Quad Core 2.4 GHz - Linux, FreeBSD 500 GB HD and 8 Gig of Ram. Runs Centos release 5.7 Server Version: Apache/2.2.21 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.21 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_qos/9.74

Warning: All sites are softcore adult sites - mostly fantasy art like elves and amazons.

1) Sites may run fine for weeks or just days at less than 10 load then start jumping to 40-80 load - no idea why. Same sites, same mods, same amount of traffic - just WHAM!

2) I get an email almost every day that says: "Large Number of Failed Login Attempts from IP (different each time)". My webhost (who almost never helps me) told me it was a udp flood or something.

3) I've changed the port for MySQL from the default. If I ever put it back to the default - I get Loads of over 100 from what must be a constant mysql port flood.

4) I've reconfigured MYSQL. Link: http://www.deadlyamazons.com/logs/mycnf.txt

5) I have 3 Joomla Jomsocial networks. I've spent a couple weeks turning all the mods/plugins off, waiting a day and then turning them back on the next day or later if there isn't any change (there hasn't been). For example, on Thursday I'll turn off videos, on Friday I'll turn off chat.. etc and nothing changes the load appreciably.

6) Joomla info: All SEF turned off - sh404sef completely disabled and removed. Components: Joomla 1.5.22, Jomsocial 2.0.5, Kunena 1/31/2011, HWDMediashare 11/22/2010 and JBolo Chat 2.7.3, Comet Chat or Envolve Chat. Page Compression is on, Cache is on 15 mins.

Please click on this forum to see links to all my reports: http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=433&t=706035&p=2777500#p2777500

Any help would be highly appreciated.