Sudden Spike in cpu usages 30s rendering time

[mcode]

Hello Everyone,

I hate to admit this but I'm stuck on a problem that I have had for a week. Please see attachment, I was able to capture the spike from the top command. Whats frustrating is I see nothing in the logs to indicate any errors. I have used the the default large.cnf file and copied it to my.cnf. Still having major issues. Please keep in mind, my server is a monster and right now traffic is minimal because we are getting ready to launch a major project in November.

Server Specs:
Processor: 8 Core - 2x Opteron Quad Core 8350 - 2.0GHz
Memory: 16GB
RAID 0 Hard Drives -SATA-: 1 Terabyte

As you can see my server should be able to take the processing and it does all the time. until this spike to 100% CPU with my SQL occurs. It only affects 4 sites on the server the rest load extremely fast. Does anyone know how I can find this conflict? It slows down everything related from putty to phpmyadmin. After is resets everything comes back to normal then it happens again at a random time.

 

[LawsHosting]

Could be slow queries. I, personally, have an old script that does this with ~700k records (and the server its on is a beast too).

Try reading http://hackmysql.com/nontech

 

[mcode]

CPU Spiked SOLVED (Issue with innodb)

I finally narrowed the issue down to the Innodb engine. I converted everything to Myisam, now everything is very fast. I felt that solution was fine only because I do not have any ecommerce or transaction data stored.

I have a question to the MySQL experts. I have heard that Innodb is faster and more secure, but in the cases of the websites I host, Myisam seems to run faster. The websites I develop are primarily joomla sites and I know they plan on moving over to Innodb for the 3.0 release.

What can be done to improve the efficiency of Innodb? Perhaps and example my.cnf for a machine with 16g of RAM, 8 core, Raid 0, 100mb port. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks