I'm having some major problems with my server load jumping at the end/start of each hour over 50 at times, yet the CPU usage stays under 10% total.

Any idea how to tweak the server to more efficiently use the CPU? It's mainly a database server, and it just grinds to a halt quite often though there aren't really that many people online.

I would do the following

login into your server via SSH as ROOT.

Run TOP - this can be done by typing "top" at the command line.

Then watch to see what processes may be causing the problem. Watching this for an hour will help you greatly in finding out what process is to blame.

Good luck.

u need some tweaking to your my.cnf

anyway i am having this problem too but not with my database... seems like my log rotation is causing it.

I've tweaked my.cnf a little, but apparently, not enough. I've been watching top for a while, but don't really see what exactly causes the load to jump....oh well

CPU usage is the actual amount of CPU processing being done. Load averages is the percent of processes waiting to use the CPU.

High loads are bad -- but are not the end of the world. If your box is responsive -- then you don't have to worry too much.