Sorry it is not 100% sure that this PHP relatet, but since PHP is the only thing i run on the Server it is very likely : Every day i find strange httpd-processes that eat up my cpu power. # /top 336 nobody 17 0 6012 6012 4944 R 95.9 0.5 55:49 httpd 32745 nobody 19 0 6324 6324 4864 R 95.5 0.6 55:01 httpd it is PHP 4.2.3 running on apache 1.3.37 Question Nr 1 : Did anyone ever have something similar an found a solution ? Question Nr 2 : How can i track what this process is doing? strace -p {pid} does not output anything Question Nr 3 : Does someone have a script that automatically kill process that reach a certain amount of CPU Time? regards Sebastian