It’s important to occasionally log in to your dedicated server by SSH and just have a check that all is well.

Type the command

mem

and a real-time display of memory usage, cpu usage, uptime and a list of processes will be displayed.

Ideally, the load average should be under 1, cpu usage below 90%, memory usage below 85% and swap usage below 80%.

If you have a defunct process hogging up all the cpu resources, for example this occasionally happens with the process yum-updatesd in Fedora, use the command either:

su -c ’service yum-updatesd stop’

or

kill -9 [the process id - displayed at left hand side of window]

The -9 forces the system to kill the process.