CPU Usage going too high?
I got this message from Linode just now:
Your Linode, ubuntu-blog-central, has exceeded the notification threshold (90) for CPU Usage by averaging 99.2% for the last 2 hours.
What does that mean? Traffic spike? Bad hosting config? Something else?
Just curious because I generally don't pay much attn to the charts/graphs on the Dashboard. Still new here.
Thanks
4 Replies
✓ Best Answer
The sub-question is what does a CPU spike like this mean? Or what could it mean?
It could mean a lot of things…or it could mean nothing. I used to have a cron job that gathered information about ASNs, IP addresses, CIDR blocks, etc. I used all this to create ipset blacklists. It took a lot of computons to make sure there were no duplicate and overlapping CIDR blocks (esp for IPv6). I would routinely get these spikes.
It could mean a DDoS attack…although not likely as these tend to be sustained over several hours. It could be a brute-force attack on ssh or http…or the fail2ban response to the same.
One spike means nothing. When you start to see a trend, that's the kind of thing that would raise my spidey-sense.
-- sw
It’s an FYI message that CPU usage has exceeded a threshold you (may have) set.
You can turn these off in the Cloud Manager.
—sw
@stevewi thank you :)
The sub-question is what does a CPU spike like this mean? Or what could it mean? I will SSH into the VPS later on after I Power On the server again, but I am now curious as to what I would look for.
@stevewi, thank you :)
I doubt it would be a DDoS attack or something like that, as it is a small blog with relatively low readership, but it very well might be one of the other things you mentioned.
I SSH'd in, and did some updates/upgrades (everything server-side only needed minor updates, from what I can tell - no "big" errors). And then updated the Ghost software, itself, as well - which needed no update as I updated everything two days ago. And again, no errors.
A mystery (for now), it seems. Haha.
Thank you for your responses!