I'm wondering if anyone can answer this question that I feel I should already know. Was looking through a friends server tonight trying to figure out an issue with slow loading images and high server loads which apparently occured after a recent CPanel update...he's on a RH 9 box, btw. When checking out the domlogs I noticed the directory was chowned root:mail which seemed pretty peculiar to me...shouldn't this be root:root? or does it really even matter?

Steve

Actually mine is setup like this

-rw-r----- 1 root USERNAME 0 Jan 19 16:37 domain.net
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jan 19 18:25 domain.net-bytes_log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jan 19 06:25 domain.net-bytes_log.offset

Is mail by chance the username of the domain in question? That does sound a little bit wierd though I doubt that would cause trouble with apache loading. Have you tried running easyapache and recompiling apache? You might also make sure your running the latest cpanel. If that does not work check /var/log/messages and look for anything that might be causing trouble. Of course running top is never a bad idea, maybe something else is hogging the cpu.

High server load would definately peg out during any stats runs which is why I've been focusing around any directories which deal with this but the server load would also just seem to randomly spike and drop and there just be a general 'lagginess' about all requests. Some of the guys scripts this guy is using don't seem to be very well optimized, too, but that's a different story I have temporarily turned off logging if load reaches above 1 which I don't really see as the solution but it does alleviate some of the issues with loads getting out of control.

He is running the latest and greatest CPanel(it is edge) and he states that it started occuring during one of the last updates that he did. The actual domlogs directory was chowned root:mail though the individual domlogs within all appeared to have proper user/group permissions. It just seemed odd to me that 'mail' would be associated with the directory....I do have a RHEL server with the same root:mail on the domlogs directory so I guess my main question is whether or not this is something that the latest CPanel releases have altered or if I've been blind all this time
and, I guess I really don't see how that would negatively impact apache writing to the individual domlog files...just curious.

Anyway, recompiling apache and php hasn't been done yet...it will be if nothing else starts popping up.

thanks for your help/suggestions.

[edit]btw; this guy finally got around to sending me a copy and paste of his update of CPanel via WHM(he stated he wasn't sure if it finished or not so decided to copy the text output of the update) and finally decided to pass it on which pretty prominently displayed part of the issue. He had guys from ev1servers looking at it, running memory tests, taking his server down for 6 hours at a time to run memtest and fsck(and him being pissed about it)when the answer was in front of him all along....it was a miscofig in cpanel.conf. some peoples children [/edit]