Server going down. Swap file...
 

Hey guys,

First, I have a custom template, but I don't think it is that fancy. Some coder created it to match the look and feel of my site.

My server has been going down and I've noticed that the "swap" is at 100% when it goes down.

Can the "processes" cause the "swap" file to get overloaded resulting in the server to go down?

These are my processes right now-

Top Process %CPU 27.0 httpd [******.com] [/boards/clientscript/vbulletin_menu.js?v364]

Top Process %CPU 7.2 httpd [******.com] [/boards/showthread.php?gotonewpost&t14436]

Top Process %CPU 6.6 httpd [******.com] [/boards/showthread.php?p164646]

Swap file is currently at 60%.

Thanks for your help!

Post your system specs. OS, number of CPUs, amount of RAM, total swap allocated, whether is a shared,vps or dedicated box, the output of free, the top part of top, and the output from vmstat 5 5

The short answer is yes, it can

Here is my server specs. I only have one website on my server so far-

Processor #1 Vendor: GenuineIntel
Processor #1 Name: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.26GHz
Processor #1 speed: 2264.864 MHz
Processor #1 cache size: 512 KB

Memory Information
Memory: 1025292k/1040320k available (2043k kernel code, 14276k reserved, 846k data, 232k init, 122816k highmem)

System Information
Linux cpanel.*****.com 2.6.18-8.el5 #1 SMP Thu Mar 15 19:57:35 EDT 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Physcial Disks
hdb: Maxtor 6L200P0, ATA DISK drive
hdb: max request size: 512KiB
hdb: 398297088 sectors (203928 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=24792/255/63, UDMA(133)
hdb: cache flushes supported


Current Memory Usage
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1027276 985968 41308 0 7948 237292
-/+ buffers/cache: 740728 286548
Swap: 3669296 2406088 1263208
Total: 4696572 3392056 1304516


Current Disk Usage
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdb7 2.0G 174M 1.7G 10% /
/dev/hdb1 99M 9.9M 84M 11% /boot
/dev/hdb2 145G 8.6G 129G 7% /home
/dev/hdb3 20G 2.8G 16G 15% /usr
/dev/hdb5 15G 6.2G 7.7G 45% /var
tmpfs 502M 0 502M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdb8 2.0G 39M 1.8G 3% /tmp

That is a truly worrying amount of swap being used. What does top look like over time, what is your server load and iowait?

My guess is 1 of 2 things
1) You have been horribly hacked, and someone is using your server as a fileserver (this happened to me once)

2) Your system is very badly configured...so badly in fact that it is not possible to fix it via posting on vb.org. You need to get someone you trust who knows something about system administration to check your apache, php and mysql configurations, and to ensure that there are no extraneous processes on the server.

Looks to me you are running out of ram. I recommend upgrading your ram soon. What is making your loads so high is that your server is having to use your Swap memory and swapd to run the programs you require and it really eats up your CPU because its not nearly as fast as your ram is. So add another gb or 2 of ram and you should be a bit more stable.

You can try lowering your maximum child process and max clients # at httpd.conf, ask for help at vbulletin.com you will find your solution over there