[cobalt-users] RaQ3 slowdown after midnight, but OK again in the morning

[Stephanie Sullivan <ses@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I've searched the cobalt-users list but not come up with anything to match.

Can I get a pointer of where else I should have been looking, or other 
approaches I might have taken to find the problem so I can fix these kinds
of problems myself in the future? Here are the details:

I've a RaQ3 with 128MB and lots of hard disk (30GB). There is almost no
activity on this server yet. It is being staged with my site and being
prepared to make a smooth transition for my customers move to this machine.

I was loading ad banners into my cgi based banner rotation software when 
about 12:30am cgi became very very slow. Like a minute to do what was almost
instaneous a few minutes before. 

I telneted in and did a "ps aux" looking at the cpu and memory usage. The
perl process running the cgi script was using 1-2% of the cpu. Everying 
else (and not a whole lot else - maybe 35 processes showing) was 0 or less 
than 1%.

When I could not locate the problem, I rebooted (Takes a while with 30GB
of disk!). No change in behaviour.

This persisted for another 1.5h until I went to bed.

The next morning I went back into the server and the same cgi script ran very 
quick, as it had before midnight.

My first suspect was a cron job was the culprit, but wouldn't it show up on
the "ps aux" ...

         Thanks in advance!
               -Stephanie Sullivan
                AVIA! web development and hosting