How to fix apache high CPU usage on Ubuntu

Hello, @mhweb

What you can do is to monitor the droplet’s performance and check from where the CPU usage is coming from. Apache might be consuming more resources if the traffic to your sites is bigger as well.

The thing is the issue might not be related with your website itself and you might experiencing the speed issues because your server is running low on memory. That is why it’s important to make sure that everything is operating normally.

You can also examine the logs for any killed processes as this will help you to see if the server is killing processes in order to remain stable. You can check this by looking at the /var/log/messages and search for kill, e.g

grep -i kill /var/log/messages

You can also check for out of memory (The OOM Killer) references in the log to see if the system is critically low on memory. This usually indicates that you need to upgrade if there are a lot of references.

grep -i oom /var/log/messages

You can exacute top or htop via ssh to see what process is taking the most CPU or memory. Both tools are really handy when it comes to monitor the server’s performance. I would like to mention that top comes installed by default and you might need to install htop.

For Ubuntu:

```sudo apt-get install htop``

Top provides a simple, real-time table of your processes, with the largest consumers on top. Running htop, we can see that it has a similar output, but is colorized, and is more interactive:

There is a really useful tutorial you can check on how to use top, htop, netstat, du and other tools to Monitor Server Resources:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-top-netstat-du-other-tools-to-monitor-server-resources

You can also use sar to check what’s going on your droplet. With sar, you can monitor performance of various Linux subsystems (CPU, Memory, I/O…) in real time.

You can use it like this:

To check the memory usage (Free and Used ):

sar -r

To check the cpu usage:

sar -u

You can also check this tutorial for monitoring the CPU usage on your droplet:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-monitor-cpu-use-on-digitalocean-droplets

You can also track the performance with the Droplet Graphs which are available in your control panel. You can find more information here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/droplets/how-to/graphs/

Another thing that you could try using is this script here which summarizes your access logs. It would summarize your access log and give you the following information:

• Top 20 POST requests
• Top 20 GET requests
• Top 20 IP logs and their geo-location

Another thing that could be causing the high CPU load is a cron job or any other scheduled task. I would recommend checking your crontab and reviewing your cron jobs. To do that you can run this command here:

crontab -l

Hope that this helps!

Regards, Alex