Inspecting processes

[Neil Doody]

I am having a problem in which apache processes are slowly going off on some
sort of rampage and I cant trace what is causing it.  Basically over time
httpd processes start hogging 100% cpu and new processes are spawned, until
the apache server is shutdown these remain at 100% and they increase until
they bring the server down.

 

I was wondering what tools I can use to see exactly what these processes are
doing, why they are stuck and what are they waiting for?

 

I am running 6.2-STABLE FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE #5 it is on the AMD64 platform.