Why would my server be swapping...

[James Wilkinson]

Wouter van Vliet wrote:
> I'd still like to know what's using that much memory and why the usage
> is only increasing, why almos nothing is running - currently just a
> webserver serving an "unavailable" html page, since we've had some
> problems in the past week with incredibly high loads. Woke up 
> wednesdaymorning at 6am after the server dinied all service the night
> before and still saw a load of 70 on the 15min avg. Anyway, drifting
> off. Besides the apache server there's postgres, doing nothing. And
> MySQL, doing nothing. And that's basically everything.

There's no substitute for gathering real data, rather than
hypothesizing.

Can you write a script to run "date", "top -bn1", and "vmstat 5 2", log
the output to a file, then sleep for a bit and loop? Keep that running
in the background. Then, when you do get problems, with any luck you
should be able to look at that log, see what was running, and what the
disk and memory were being used for.

(Also, check what cron is running.)

Hope this helps,

James.

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