Our web server is slower than normal presently because of a failure of logrotate, a program which moves and compresses old logs.  This has a allowed a large amount of log data to build up.

     That in turn has caused fail2ban to consume a lot of resources, particularly disk I/O, and also flush the disk cache because it has to go through a couple of months worth of logging instead of the current days logs.

     I am working on correcting this and cleaning out the old logs, it may take a day or two because of the volume of logs involved.