High CPU Usage Causes Server Power Off-Collection of common programming errors

11 years ago
admin
2 minutes

My first post here, so apologies if anything is missing.

I currently have an Ubuntu hosted VPS, which periodically runs a PHP script which does a lot of regex processing and interaction with a local MySQL database (this is running Percona server).

It is a dual core VPS, and at one point when the script runs, the processors jump to 100% each for a period of time. I run a mbstat -P 0,1 1 to report the CPU usage, and it is pretty much a minute of high usage, and the server turns itself off – it doesn’t shutdown, it powers off.

My provider is suggesting that this is a software (OS) problem. I have recently updated the Kernel, but I cannot find anything relating to settings that would cause the server to power down completely.

I have looked through all the logs I can find (through /var/log anyway) and can’t find anything of note. Not even anything in there saying that it’s being powered down or there is a problem. This is what led me to think that this may be a provider setting that shuts the VPS down when it sees high CPU use.

Ubuntu Version: 12.04.3 LTS x64 Kernel Version: 3.2.0-54-generic

Please let me know if you require any other information. Any help that anyone could offer would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

  1. Could you limit the PHP script in such a way that it only uses 1 CPU? If your assumption about the provider is true, the machine wouldn’t shut down if only one CPU is used, I guess.

    Is it possible that you run out of memory? That may lead to a shutdown of several processes and maybe result in a complete crash/shutdown. Do you have swap space enabled?