sar -q 5 12
This will run the sar command with the -q flag that shows load averages.
The 5 tells it to run a check every 5 seconds, and the 12 tells it to do it 12 times.
If your ldavg-1 column stays consistently high, or continues to rise during this load check, this is an indication that you could have something on the server spiking its usage.
********************
Using the following code we are going to look at our website's access log to see how many "hits" happened from 2:09PM - 2:10PM (14:09 - 14:10). This way we can see the requests leading up to the spike, as well as after:
egrep "15/Jan/2013:14:09|15/Jan/2013:14:10" /home/userna5/access-logs/example.com | wc -l
*********************
