Our web server suddenly has been giving us load issues. After I restart Apache the load stays low for a few hours up to a day or so then its back up to around 3.0 until I restart Apache again. Any suggestions on tracking down what is causing this?

Thanks!

Chris Edwards

top - 20:15:05 up 19 days, 10:59,  1 user,  load average: 2.11, 2.17, 2.47
Tasks: 532 total,   6 running, 525 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
Cpu(s): 11.5%us,  0.4%sy,  0.0%ni, 88.1%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:  32842656k total, 13185872k used, 19656784k free,  6143740k buffers
Swap:  1048568k total,        0k used,  1048568k free,  3515252k cached

 PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
19089 apache    20   0 1912m 1.5g 6584 R 99.6  4.9  71:01.53 /usr/sbin/httpd
21136 apache    20   0  392m  55m 5736 R 95.0  0.2   0:03.45 /usr/sbin/httpd
21139 apache    20   0  374m  38m 5808 S 40.5  0.1   0:04.91 /usr/sbin/httpd
21124 apache    20   0  389m  51m 5948 R 38.9  0.2   0:03.15 /usr/sbin/httpd
21111 apache    20   0  371m  35m 5964 S 18.8  0.1   0:01.22 /usr/sbin/httpd
21127 apache    20   0  375m  39m 5832 S 17.8  0.1   0:01.66 /usr/sbin/httpd
21128 apache    20   0  374m  38m 5792 S 16.2  0.1   0:01.56 /usr/sbin/httpd
21110 apache    20   0  374m  38m 5848 S 15.9  0.1   0:01.02 /usr/sbin/httpd
21113 apache    20   0  374m  38m 5836 S 15.9  0.1   0:02.16 /usr/sbin/httpd
21077 apache    20   0  379m  43m 6408 S 11.0  0.1   0:07.22 /usr/sbin/httpd
21101 apache    20   0  384m  49m 6988 R  5.8  0.2   0:04.47 /usr/sbin/httpd
21112 apache    20   0  374m  38m 5956 R  2.6  0.1   0:01.61 /usr/sbin/httpd