I cannot connect to my droplet and it's CPU usage is over 90%

Posted on March 30, 2017

I’m using the SFO1 server, Ubuntu 16.04.2 x64, and installed a proxy called shadowsocks. The problem I have is the connection to this droplet would somehow be crashed. I cannot connect to the droplet using either Putty or Digitalocean console. And when I go to the droplet page, I see a over 90% CPU rate.

Like This

Does anyone know how to solve this issue? I’m really novice and not a programmer at all… Let me know if you need more intel to know what’s going on here…

Many thanks.

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

silverhawk184

March 30, 2017

Unfortunately, it looks like your only option is to reboot the server. There should be a button in the droplet page.

Jonathan Tittle

March 30, 2017

@bluesagittary

If the CPU usage is spiking, it could be that the software you’re running is extremely intensive for the size of Droplet you’re using, or it’s disk intensive, causing CPU to spike due to higher I/O leading to higher wait times.

If you’re experiencing delays connecting to SSH, either of those scenarios could be the reason.

We’d need to take a look at the output of the top command to get a clear look at usage. If you can run:

top

Then hit SHIFT+M, followed by c, then e we can see the sorted process listing. You may very well need to reboot the server for this to work since you’re not able to connect right now.