more on bogged down server

[Steve Rieger]

Harold Hallikainen wrote:
> Last week, I was out of town for the week and, of course, my FC4 system
> slowed down to a crawl, and eventually I could not get into it at all. I
> just bought and installed a "Web Power Switch" (under $100 at
> http://www.digital-loggers.com/lpc.html), so I will always (I hope) be
> able to reboot the system from anywhere.
>
> I also reduced the number of clients (I think that was the term) in
> httpd.conf from 150 to 50.
>   

> ...
>
> My web server has a lot of large files that will take a while for people
> to download. I suspect Apache is starting another thread for each of
> these, and keeping it open a long time. As more and more requests come in,
> the load just keeps getting bigger. Here's a recent top:
>   

let me guess, i make a request for a file to your apache, apache looks 
for the file, loads it into ram, then loads it into swap then starts 
piping it to me.

thats the typical issue with large files, and at the end of the day you 
have three copies of the same file in seperate locations, (not for very 
long, but long enough to eat up all the swap and ram)

can you post your fstab and httpd.conf please.
(remove the private stuff)
thanx