Check server resource usage by user on a CentOS VPS

Question

How can I check which account/user is abusing/using the most resources on my VPS?

Quite often, web hosts suspend an account citing high resource usage. How can I check the same on my VPS? I have root access.

Answer 1

It depends on what resource you wish to account for.

• CPU: Install BSD process accounting (package acct on Debian; from memory it's psacct on CentOS, but I might be misremembering something there); this'll give you a log of all processes run, with UID, CPU/wall time, peak memory usage, etc, all included. Process as required.
• RAM: For "over time" usage, BSD process accounting will do the trick. If you're after periodic "point in time" analysis (to catch large, long-running processes which are the most important consumer of memory) I'm not aware of anything off the shelf, but something that walks through /proc and scoops up the data out of /proc/X/maps isn't rocket science.
• Network: This isn't a well-covered area for local users; if you're just after their usage of solicited incoming traffic the logs of your various servers can be used to analyse usage; if you're allowing unfettered inbound/outbound connections (not a good idea in the first place) and want to account for that traffic, something like netacct might be the least-worst option for this, although if you've got nefarious users it's not hard to get around.
• Disk space: A periodic du will do for the simple case; if you really want to stop 'em, set up disk quotas.