Help - Extreme Load Average on Server

Can you give some information about the server itself; ie. what speed is the processor.

From the screenshots of TOP, it is clear that your memory on the server is too low since it is using the swap space. Typically, you don't ever want your server to use swap space.

My initial recommendation would be to upgrade your RAM to at least 1GB.

The High load reported at the moment is definately because your system is trying to play catch-up because it uses hard drive space as virtual memory. It's unfortunately difficult to say which process started the high memory usage. It's possible that an application could have a memory leak, and that is what causes the server to start swapping in the first place. Best way to monitor that is top keep an eye on top as the server reboots. In theory, if your CPU is adequate, and your hard drives are not slouches ( preferably SCSI or SATA2) 512MB ram should be enough for plenty of websites and services.

Can you give us an indication of how busy the websites are that runs on your servers? It might also simply be that they are receiving lots of hits, and that will unfortunately cause high resource usage. Only remedy there is a bigger server...

You can also read up on www.apache.org and www.mysql.com on how to tweak the particular services for high-loads - but like I said already, throw in at least 512MB of RAM ( it's cheap and easy) and see where that get's you...

yeah the sites are receiving more than 25k per day and there are 3 sites!!

Well, in that case it seems that an upgrade might be the only solution here. The websites themselves (ie. the way they were coded) can also play a role. If the content are all dynamically created, stored and served from MySQL, then load will also be higher than having "static" html pages.

My initial recommendation stands; try to add more RAM and see if it helps. It's a quick, cheap and simple way to address resource usage. If that does not help, then either tweak the server software, or do a complete upgrade to a faster CPU, much more RAM and fast SCSI Harddrives.

What server will be the best?

>server 1
Celeron D 2.8 GHz CPU
512MB RAM
80 GB Hard Drive
2000 GB Data Transfer

>server 2
Pentium 4 3.0 GHz CPU
1024MB RAM
160 GB SATA Hard Drive
3000 GB Data Transfer

>server 3
Pentium 4 3.4 GHz CPU
2048MB RAM
2 x 160 GB SATA Hard Drives
4000 GB Data Transfer

Server 2 should be fine, but server3 looks even better;)

Those snippets look like an ISP price list options for a co-location/managed server at their server farm, am I right?

Another option that works out cheaper and takes away the hassle of having to look after the hardware and upgrade when things run slow, is to see if they have a "reseller" shared hosting package.

Those packages gives you your own space on one of their servers which you can allocate as you please to your domains, but the nice thing is; the ISP has to deal with the head-ache of making sure the server is fast enough/has enough ram for all the domains running on it, else they will lose their clients...

well am planing on getting a faster dedicated server then..