While The Planet is here to act as “remote
hands and eyes” for connectivity issues that might keep you from
accessing your server, as system
owner/administrator, it is your responsibility to troubleshoot and
resolve
load issues with your system.
Whenever you run into problems with your server slowing down or acting
sluggishly, you will need to take steps to first identify what is
causing the load, and then address those particular services.



If you are interested in finding out how many child
processes are present, ps is your best bet.





If run with no arguments, ps will only show you the applications you
have running in your current session.  This usually isn’t very
exciting:



$ ps

  PID TTY          TIME CMD

28881 pts/0    00:00:00 tcsh

28905 pts/0    00:00:00 ps





However if you throw it some extra switches you can get meaningful data from it:

Sometimes a single snapshot doesn’t provide enough information. 
This is where top comes into play.  Top is an application similar
to ‘ps auxw’ except that it periodically refreshes it’s display. 
You can find more information on top here:



http://support.theplanet.com/knowledgebase/users/kb.php?id=10008&category_id=0&sid2=

Again, as system administrator, load
issues and optimization are ultimately your responsibility. If you would like The
Planet to troubleshoot your load issues, or optimize services causing
said issues, billable Administrative Time will be required.

If you’d like information on Administrative Time, you can reference this article:

http://support.theplanet.com/knowledgebase/users/kb.php?id=10521&category_id=0&sid2=