Coppermine is causing a high server load on my server. Any settings I should check?
When does this occur? During batch adding or viewing? Try to post as much detail as possible so people can provide advice that is more pertinent.
This actually occurs on a client's board. She says that she isn't doing anything when this is occuring. Sometimes the load spikes up to 7.00 (Unix).
A board? How is coppermine related, it's not a bbs.
The load spikes to 7 what?
Post a link to the site you're refering to - probably, there's way too much detail level on the front page - this is what usually causes most traffic.
the load average is just the number of processes waiting to take their CPU, mem slice. That's all. Depending on the kind of processes a load of 0.8 can melt down your server (if it's eg. a lot of I/O processes that lock mem, CPU and other critical stuff). On the other hand a load of 40-80 may mean all is OK. I had servers running with a load average of 70-100. And they were still faster than some shared host (now you can guess with what load these guys run their boxes). I have even seen load averages over 1000 (whilst a brute force attack) and the box still accepted commands.
so if you can't say what's running on the server, how much data it transfers etc. you can't say anything. You can log the running processes when the load jumps up. From here you start checking what's going on. Maybe it's just a backup process??? Who knows