Server load too high

I am running the tagboard service on my server. Few months ago I bought
the new dedicated server with Dual Xeon 3.2 GHz and 2GB Ram.
The board is written in PHP with Mysql. Not long ago I updated the
version PHP to 5. and the problem started.

The load on the server skyrocked between 39-52. And I seriously have no
idea what to do about it.

This is remotedly hosted servise and there are number of connections
from other websites to my own. However I don't have any other working
websites on this server. Each client is connected to the database with
mysql_connect. But I do not know why there is a problem with server
load and why the database takes so much from the server resources?
Below is a sample of the Current CPU usage. As you can see the database
connection takes a lot of resources.

Pid Owner Priority Cpu % Mem % Command
7128 mysql 0 1.3 2.0 /usr/sbin/mysqld
--basedir=/ --datadir=/var/lib/mysql --user=mysql
--pid-file=/var/lib/mysql/host.yobug.com.pid --skip-locking
7112 nobody 0 0.1 0.8
/usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -DSSL

I also checked CPU/Memory/MySQL Usage and last few days I this since I
installed php version 5 the CPU % usage is almost 99-123%! The website
can't work like this.

I thought about couple of solutions but if you can help please write a
constructive response.

1. I was thinking changing the structure of the database. Since all
the posts are in one single table I thought to change it to separate
tables for each customer. Than the process of posting or writing to the
database table would be much faster since the tables would not be
locked for others and the processes don't have to wait.

2. reinstalling PHP to older version php4.

Is there any way that the problem can be solved? if Yes let me know.



ewunia@earthlink.net