Ask HN: server I/O spike

[joaquin_win]

I have an app on linode and they sent me an email letting me know of a spike in disk I/o that lasted about 2 hour ad now it's back to normal.

What should I look at when diagnosing what happened?

Weird things at first glance:

1) A spike of incoming network traffic happened at 22:00 2) A spike of outgoing network traffic between 2:00 to 4:00 3)Disk I/O between 6:00 and 8:00

[onur]

You can check the access logs of your server. Probably this is caused by a bot crawling your site and you will see the same IP over and over there. But I'm totally assuming you have a site hosted there which has some kind of database dependence and lots of pages to crawl.

[joaquin_win]

Thanks, Any tools to help me along?

[flannell]

Yep, same for me. I've just setup a Linode server today in their London DC.

[flannell]

Sorry, meant to say it happened to me to! Same time and everything.

[joaquin_win]

That's weird, do you think it's related? Maybe a bot like onur said indexing all sites on that ip range?

[rhizome]

Check your logs to find out what was going on.

[eps]

Check your cron jobs too, including those run under non-root accounts.