Detect and kill processes causing load to go up

[jjaguara]

Hi folks, I need to tap into the collective wisdom of the forum.

I use a badly written piece of software with pretty stupid database design choices, that I paid for (I could give you a list of the things it does right, but let's just say it's the best on its segment, and right for the price). It's a newsletter manager, multi-user, multi-list, multi-everything.

My problem is that for sending email, it performs some batch processing (personalizing messages, inserting tracking code to links, etc) that hangs the server almost daily.

Is it possible to monitor the load average of the server and restart httpd if it goes up 15? I've had 80+ load averages before crashing. Nothing suffers if I just kill apache and restart it, and the batch can resume with a smaller task every time.

I was thinking about some sort of cron job that reads load average and issues a 'service httpd restart' if it sees something wrong.

Any ideas?

Cheers, Andres

PS: and don't panic, it's on a ded server