I've had this dedicated for about 2 months now with hardly any problem. All of the sudden, yesterday morning the server is 'clogged'. It isn't down, its pingable...and I can login via ssh, but it takes about 15 minutes just to get to a prompt. The server has basically eaten all of it's own resources and has slowed to a halt.

If I reboot, the problem is gone, but it begins again, with the process count slowly sliding up until around 1000 processes, i really cant do anything else. This only takes about 10 mins. I've seen the process count go as high as 2200+. If instead after the reboot, I run in and shut down apache, then restart, i dont have this problem. Everything comes back fine and settles in around 150-170 processes (normal). I'll go have a meal and all of the suddent a phone call 10 hrs later or something and it has happened again. Its happened 3 times in the last 48 hrs. Most of the processes are httpd and mysqld, and almost all of them are sleeping.

I had maxspareservers at 100, so I dont understand how there can be 500 sleeping httpd processes (i think that is what i am seeing). I also had mysql max servers at 500, but I cut both of these numbers in half last time this happened, and set a max total apache servers at 800. No new software has been installed, it is a single web site that I run, heavy traffic and heavily dynamic content though. Apparently rackshack is looking at it, but Id like to see if anyone here has any theories?

Have you ever given any thought to your logs possible causing the problem?

I know the EXACT same problem you mentioned happened to my server and after trying EVERYTHING I was eventually told it was my access and error logs that were slowing the server down. I checked it out, and sure enough... I had hundreds of MB's in error logs! I used TelNet to delete them, then rebooted the server. It worked!

Every week or two I manually delete my logs to keep things running smoothly.

I've been watching logs. I've noticed that after the virtual server logs hit 2gigs (roughly 3 days of logs), things slow down considerably. There is only one site on the machine. However, I have been maintaining <1gig by hand recently. Is there any way that you know of to turn logs completely off for 1 account? Perhaps a symlink for the log file to /dev/null?

mm

i'm not qualified enuff to offer any proper help on this, but i had the same problem, and looked into it in this thread:

http://forum.rackshack.net/showthread.php?...=&threadid=7754

With help from Madsere editing the logrotate config file worked a treat, had my server running smoothly ever since.

good luck.

Peakin