Question

How does my CPU usage suddenly peak ?

Hi,

Ubui am running an ubuntu 18.10 on a Droplet with enabled monitoring and have set it to notify me when CPU usage is higher than 80% for testing purposes.

What i noticed is that there was a sudden peak of 89% CPU Usage while the machine is powered on however not in use so i wonder if there is a way for me to know what processes have exploited CPU %?

Is this normal behaviour ?

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luckyl01810 • October 5, 2021

I had the same problem now I found a solution I hope it will work for you. actually, someone was attacking with a brute force attack on my website so why my website was down and the graph shows CPU 100% usage.

First of all, check which application takes much usage so enter the command “top” it will show the real-time CPU usage. in my case, PHP-fpm was taking 95% usage.

Now you have to check your Nginx log file. “sudo tail -f /var/log/nginx/access.log” it will show the error or bad gateway access details… now you have to copy the IP address which is repeated a lot of times you have to block it.

You can block IP by using this command “iptables -I INPUT -s 35.186.156.199 -j DROP”

I hope this issue will be resolved.

jarland • April 18, 2019

Greetings!

It’s hard to say what it could be, it’s not particularly unusual. Perhaps someone tried a strong and distributed brute force attack against a public facing service. Perhaps you have a web server running and a crawler came along to hammer away at it.

If I ever need to get down to that kind of level and find out what happened at a specific time, I usually prefer syssnap to do the job. It’s made by cPanel but by no means requires their other software to be installed.

https://github.com/CpanelInc/tech-SysSnapv2

Jarland