Some server operators find themselves battling with a high CPU load on their systems, which inevitably slows down website responses.

The main cause of high CPU loads is often due to search engine crawlers and “bad bots”, which are essentially crawlers similar to search engines but do not serve any purpose for you. What bad bots do with the crawled data remains a mystery. //

If you want to observe the 20 processes that continuously place the highest load on a server live, you can do this with a watch command line command:

 watch "ps aux | sort -nrk 3,3 | head -n 20"

Sometimes slow database processes or a high number of them can slow down database transactions. Let’s extend the watch with an extra section that displays the current database processes, too:

 MYSQL_PWD=`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` watch "ps aux | sort -nrk 3,3 | head -n 20 && echo "\ " && mysqladmin proc status -u admin"