We got an e-mail from our hosting provider saying that we were using 4 times the apache processes that a shared site should... no details except perhaps too much content (uh, so we gut the site), too much traffic (it's dropped since the album release), or too many hits from search engines (suuuure, we've been on the first page of google for a while, but I doubt they started hammering us).
Think of server processes as making the cpu think, like how you can see what processes are running in windows 2000/xp by holding ctrl-alt-del and viewing the task manager. I figured it was something php/mysql related as it seemed the database was a bit spotty a week or so before they contacted us - pages with news content and the forum were down but, say, discography pages that are static were up.
I decided to just pull the forum from public view for a bit while waiting for us to get bumped up the ladder as forums use a lot of queries (how many posts, content of posts, who posted, blah blah blah) and it doesn't cripple the site. It seemed better than having them complain to the point where they'd just pull the plug. I assumed we could see the difference in server load over time with or without the forum but we just heard from a senior analyst who said we were fine and good to go.
I've encountered stuff like this on other sites I run - it's usually someone just hammering the server for a bit, then something goes over critical levels in their logs/monitoring and they assume it is something unique to the site itself.
