Atomicorp

I've noticed that CPU usage increased exponentially since the end of december. The last update to the machine was on the 21st, and it included "asl-php-common asl-php-cli asl-php-pdo asl-php-mysqlnd asl-php asl-php-process asl-php-gd ca-certificates mod_security nss-sysinit nss nss-tools pixman tzdata"

Since then, simple commands, such as bring CPU usage close to 100% and take a long time to complete, causing other processes, including apache, to error out.

I'm wondering if these issues could be linked to this update, since nothing else changed on the server besides this update.

Please advise. Any help is welcome.

**UPDATE: A full restart (host+guest) solved the problem**

Sounds like a slow disk or very high disk activity. Have you checked the health of your filesystem, RAID-array, SAN? Are you monitoring disk activity?