Load Average high due to Ntop using 100% Cpu

So recently while being oncall, i noticed that the load average was very high on my aws ec2 instance.

The first thing i did, was run TOP command: which showed me the following:

Ntop –  taking 105 % cpu and  500MB  !!!!

Now thats Fishy !!

I googled and found out these two links which suggested that NTOP is broken:

https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=2554.0

&

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ntop/+bug/461141

So i proceeded to stop ntop, but stop failed, so i just killed it !

kill   -9   <ntop_pid>

and

wallah the load averages returned to normal 🙂

 

Symptoms:

• Ntop running for a while.
• load average slowly increasing
• increase in network traffic