wordpress borked- Takes over Server

Hi:

Yesterday, I noticed my server was crawling. After testing, I concluded the ONLY cause of the slow down was massive http clients caused by my wordpress install. I have been running wordpress on this machine for over a year… and I guess I have a lot of info in my site- been posting 2-3 posts a day… but still, I figger WP is more robust than that. I have a decent server…

Anyway, I yanked the virtual server for my wordpress install, just so my other sites could be online. This morning, I checking in again, and reinstalled the VS… and it instantly started taking over the server. Here is top after running wordpress for about 2 minutes:

last pid: 22741; load averages: 0.87, 1.35, 0.82 up 7+14:08:48 06:16:51
93 processes: 1 running, 90 sleeping, 2 zombie
CPU: 11.5% user, 0.0% nice, 9.1% system, 0.1% interrupt, 79.2% idle
Mem: 895M Active, 1125M Inact, 447M Wired, 96M Cache, 316M Buf, 410M Free
Swap: 8192M Total, 16M Used, 8176M Free

PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND
22562 daemon 1 -4 0 140M 93088K ufs 3 0:05 6.30% httpd (WORDPRESS)
22574 daemon 1 -4 0 180M 121M ufs 3 0:28 5.96% httpd (WORDPRESS)
22634 daemon 1 -4 0 136M 89468K ufs 1 0:07 5.96% httpd (WORDPRESS)
22577 daemon 1 -8 0 175M 116M biord 0 0:21 5.86% httpd (WORDPRESS)
22573 daemon 1 -4 0 180M 121M ufs 3 0:28 5.76% httpd (WORDPRESS)
22569 daemon 1 -4 0 186M 125M ufs 3 0:28 5.57% httpd (WORDPRESS)
22558 daemon 1 -4 0 181M 121M ufs 2 0:27 5.37% httpd (WORDPRESS)
22570 daemon 1 -4 0 136M 89280K ufs 2 0:06 5.37% httpd (WORDPRESS)
22560 daemon 1 4 0 96896K 59168K sbwait 2 0:05 4.05% httpd
22697 daemon 1 4 0 50816K 16080K sbwait 2 0:00 0.29% httpd
5955 root 1 44 0 35308K 4468K select 2 0:51 0.00% perl5.10.1
5840 root 1 44 0 5856K 588K select 1 0:14 0.00% syslogd
22559 daemon 1 20 0 47744K 20028K lockf 2 0:06 0.00% httpd
30006 cartoon 1 44 0 33808K 516K select 3 0:04 0.00% sshd
6040 root 1 8 0 6784K 484K nanslp 2 0:04 0.00% cron
95682 nobody 1 20 0 6976K 2504K lockf 0 0:03 0.00% httpd
95690 nobody 1 20 0 6976K 2516K lockf 2 0:03 0.00% httpd
95695 nobody 1 20 0 6976K 2480K lockf 3 0:03 0.00% httpd
95681 nobody 1 4 0 6976K 2512K sbwait 3 0:03 0.00% httpd

You can see each of those http processes is up to 140-180megs… not normal. If I let this go for any length of time, load average will got up to 8 or 9, and I have seen it go as high as 15 (load average on this server is normally .5 or so)… and I start hitting swap file… bad.

I tried to log into my admin, and maybe start uninstalling plug ins… I just started running w# Cache thinking that might help, and I cannot get to ANY pages… I get:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /hd2/web/b/blog/public_html/wp-content/plugins/better-wp-security/inc/filecheck.php on line 49

So I am at a loss… other than disabling the site, I don’t really know what else to do to solve this.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Dave