Hello,

I will appreciate for any advice, the problem is


We have 2GB ram in server and few websites are hosted! It was working fine from last 2 years! But from 7 days, apache is not working fine! Sites opens too slow, sometimes site take around one minute to open!

FTP, SSL and SSH works fine! Only we face problem in apache, It shows that we have used all RAM, and sometimes it shows that only 36MB Ram is free out of 2GB ram

Once we restart apache, server works fine from 1 hour time and after that RAM starts increasing and sites opens too much slow

what can be the issue, i do not think that this is RAM issue or we should increase RAM, as i have see that even when we have 800 MB RAM free, the condition of sites remain same as they open too much slow.

Please advice if it is any compermised server issue or any apache issue or RAM problems!

Sounds like the server needs to be optimized a bit. Have you changed anything from the default configuration for apache and mysql?

What do you mean by optimization of server ? We have not changed any configuration or mysql things! As per server people they said that someone last week tried to hack the server with a automatic script which generates auto passwords and try to login in SSH

By default the server is provisioned with a 'generic' configuration that will work for most/all situations, however it may not be the best configuration for your environment. Depending on what types of websites and/or applications you are running, you may want to look into tweaking the httpd.conf and my.cnf to work better with your scenario.

In regards to the attack, they are frequent on the internet, and as long as you have a strong password, and your system is up to date, it shouldn't really be an issue, just an annoyance. People that are generally concerned with these attacks run some kind of brute force detection to automatically block connections from machines that attempt dictionary password attacks such as these.

This server was working fine from last one year!
We are facing this issue from only 7 days, so do you think that we should ask the server people to look into httpd conf files instead of RAM increase issue!

Its probably a good start, the default configuration files have a few things that can be changed to help a lot. Its also cheaper then a RAM upgrade.

I would also have them look further into the attack to make sure the server has not been compromised, since it all happened suddenly. Especially if you've not changed anything. Something is driving the server over the tipping point, so you need to sort out what that is.

You may also want to install a little application called MyTop (search for it on Google or Yahoo) that was created by Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo fame some time ago. It'll let you or whoever has SSH capabilities watch MySQL hits in real time, pointing out if you have a badly optmized database that is eating up memory or have a script somewhere that is not properly closing MySQL connections.

Step #1 is to sort out what's driving the server over the tipping point. Adding RAM without first sorting out the root problem is nothing more than a bandaid. One that might work for awhile, but won't really solve the issue in the long term.