Hello,

I am a novice Linux server administrator so please bear with me.

One of the server I manage is a web server which runs normally most of the day, but in the morning as it's backing up the mysql database, the load avg goes sky high and the server eventually comes to a halt, requiring me to hardboot it.

How can I go about fault finding here?

The server is:

Linux ns.mydomain.com 2.6.18-92.1.22.el5 #1 SMP Tue Dec 16 12:03:43 EST 2008 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
CentOS release 5.2 (Final)
1.8 GHz 2MB Cache Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor
512 MB RAM and 80 GB hard disk drive

Let me know if you would like me to post my.cnf or httpd.conf's settings

Many thanks!