OCI: Ubuntu Spike in CPU Usage Due To Apache Errors

Applies To:

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure - Version N/A and later

Linux x86-64

Symptoms:

There was a spike in CPU Utilization seen from the OCI Metrics page:

Cause:

There were hundreds of “apache abort” messages seen in the logs:

[Thu Oct 19 20:30:12.143113 2023] [core:notice] [pid 10499] AH00051: child pid 5962 exit signal Aborted (6), possible coredump in /etc/apache2
[Thu Oct 19 20:30:12.143166 2023] [core:error] [pid 10499] AH00546: no record of generation 1015 of exiting child 5962
[Thu Oct 19 20:30:12.143177 2023] [core:notice] [pid 10499] AH00051: child pid 5963 exit signal Aborted (6), possible coredump in /etc/apache2
[Thu Oct 19 20:30:12.143181 2023] [core:error] [pid 10499] AH00546: no record of generation 1015 of exiting child 5963

Solution:

There are no performance collecting packages installed on the instance, so it is impossible to determine the cause of the CPU spike.