I've had about 48 hours of extremely high CPU usage on my main MySQL database for no apparent reason. I realize this question is quite similar to the one posed here: http://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/20225/high-cpu-usage-from-mysql-with-no-queries-at-all-running However, this MySQL server does not have ntp installed at all, and as the leap-second bug is from a few months ago, I don't think that's the explanation. SHOW PROCESSLIST does not show any long-running processes/queries, and there have been no recent changes to DB schema, etc. The server is also extremely locked down so that only other application servers within the VPN may access it, and has plenty of RAM (17 GB) which is not maxed out either. Is there anything else that I should look into, or any other common causes of high CPU? The server is an EC2 m2.xlarge instance: 17.1 GB RAM, 6.5 EC2 "Compute Units" with this configuration: user = mysql socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock port = 3306 basedir = /usr datadir = /var/lib/mysql tmpdir = /tmp skip-external-locking key_buffer = 256M sort_buffer_size = 16M read_buffer_size = 16M max_allowed_packet = 32M thread_stack = 192K thread_cache_size = 8 max_connections = 200 thread_concurrency = 12 query_cache_limit = 4M query_cache_size = 128M log_error = /var/log/mysql/error.log log_slow_queries = /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log long_query_time = 2 log-queries-not-using-indexes server-id = 1 log_bin = /var/lib/mysql/mysql-bin.index expire_logs_days = 10 max_binlog_size = 1000M sync_binlog = 1 innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:2000M;ibdata2:10M:autoextend innodb_buffer_pool_size = 11G innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 128M innodb_log_file_size = 1000M innodb_log_buffer_size = 32M innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1 innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 50