Hello Guys,

I have had to eventually ask someone what this problem could be after spending nearly 6 hours on the server and nothing relavent on google search. I'm sure someone would of have had this same problem.

The server runs which none of are hammered:

Apache2/Mysql
Ntop
Vsftpd


Okay I have 2 servers p4 2.8 one with 1gig of ram and one with 512 of ram. These are running Debian 3.1 with kernel 2.6.8-2-386.

These two server don't running anything load intensive the load is usually around 0.05, 0.11, 0.09. On the 20/02/2006 on both server the loads went upto 25.00, 29.11, 40.09 for example and the memory usage went sky high. The server were both slow getting on to the shell and webservers.

I have tried to reboot it seems fine and then if i leave it a while the same thing happens all the ram starts to get eaten up etc and the loads go high again. The load issue is not down to cpu usage thats only 1 % when this happens roughly.

I have rebooted one server after the other one seemed to of have fixed itself strangly. I did think there was someone behind this maybe some sort of kernel exploit because the loads went really low at around 12pm midnight / 1am morning.

Here is an example of the servers top:

top - 08:50:00 up 1:05, 1 user, load average: 1.58, 1.48, 1.46
Tasks: 208 total, 2 running, 206 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 1.3% us, 0.7% sy, 0.0% ni, 67.0% id, 30.3% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.7% si
Mem: 906736k total, 902232k used, 4504k free, 42404k buffers
Swap: 1485972k total, 0k used, 1485972k free, 625660k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2879 root 16 0 2196 1132 1852 R 0.3 0.1 0:00.02 top
1 root 16 0 1504 512 1352 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.61 init
2 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
3 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:02.67 events/0
4 root 12 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper
5 root 13 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid
56 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.89 kblockd/0
69 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0
68 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.85 kswapd0
212 root 25 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kseriod
232 root 6 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ata/0
233 root 25 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 scsi_eh_0
234 root 25 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 scsi_eh_1
243 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khubd
341 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:02.71 kjournald
1840 root 16 0 1560 636 1392 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.01 syslogd
1843 root 16 0 2444 1504 1344 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.06 klogd


If anyone can please help me, someone must of have had this problem before. I did do apt-get install kernel-package on one of the servers and it seemed of of have fixed it, although that probably didn't do anything...

teamh

Hi,

All sorted i had to remove apache2 and all of its mods!!

\

Did you work out why is this so?