I have a dedicated server running centos. It is "slightly managed" meaning I get a little help if I desperately need it; otherwise on my own.

Many of the programs on this server I've had to write myself (less than optimal code for sure). Others are commercial but some are renowned
resource hogs. I find lately that the load is well above 1.0 even during slow times, and I'd really like to find a way to start looking at server usage and hacking away at egregious wastes of resources. Obviously my trouble areas are apache and mysql.

Unfortunately the older I get the less technically adept I get at working from the command line without pretty graphs etc and seem to be figuring out next to nothing from things like ps -aux. If someone could recommend something simple I could start with to get a better picture of my server's usage, I would appreciate it. I'm sure all this has a technical name I could google further on but not sure what that would be.

Thanks!

I use a combination of top , ptree and sar to look at CPU hogs.

Top provides the pids of CPU intensive processes which works well with ptree to work out what they are doing.

Sar, google for ksar as a nice graphing tool, identifies times fo day to go investigate.

Thanks so much, this is exactly the sort of direction I was hoping for. Greatly appreciate it!