Heavy CPU load on MediaTemple: help decipher from TOP query

Question

For one of our clients, we have unusually high CPU/DB load. Here's what we got from the host:

1878 clientsite 20 0 213m 43m 8088 R 18.7 2.3 0:05.86 /usr/bin/php-cgi -c /var/www/vhosts/acme.com/etc/php.ini 1903 clientsite 20 0 219m 48m 7988 R 12.8 2.5 0:04.06 /usr/bin/php-cgi -c /var/www/vhosts/acme.com/etc/php.ini 1900 clientsite 20 0 214m 44m 8088 R 12.5 2.3 0:02.97 /usr/bin/php-cgi -c /var/www/vhosts/acme.com/etc/php.ini

Another appears to be from your database:

1005 mysql 20 0 282m 48m 6564 S 26.0 2.5 3:08.51 /usr/libexec/mysqld --basedir=/usr --datadir=/var/lib/mysql --user=mysql --log-error=/var/log/mysqld.log

Is there anyway we can find out what part of EE (if any) that's causing the load? We're having very frequent "Internal Server Error" site outtages.

Thank you all!

Answer 1

New Relic is a fabulous tool for this.

Answer 2

New Relic will help troubleshooting bottlenecks, but this particular issue turned out to be a Plesk service issue.

We had to restart the Plesk service on the server after a few tweaks, and the site became a lot more stable. So, at least on this particular site, the culprit wasn't EE nor the server itself, but Plesk.