On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 9:59 AM, james <james at wintercastle.net> wrote: > I'm having an issue with an apache web server running the latest CentOS5 > kernel (this issue is not new to the kernel). After a few days/weeks of > running the server will become unresponsive and will require a physical > reboot in order to come back online. The system is so unresponsive when the > issue occurs that login at console is not even possible. Do you have everything *else* updated? And what kind of web service are you running? There's a lot of third party freeware and commercial tools that was not written with any kind of resource management in mind, and which may require a simple web server restart on a regular baris to free memory. (MusicBrainz: I remember porting MusicBrainz.....) > I have atop installed and have looked back before the crash to see what > happened process wise and I can see the http starts using a lot of memory > and CPU usage. The vmcommit jumps from 1.8 GB to 4.8GB in a matter of a few > minutes. The VSIZE of the httpd process jumps from 8.1GB to 36.9GB. So > apache is doing something -- but how can I get historical data for this? I Look in /var/log/http/*. > also see that paging is very active, probably why the server is > unresponsive. I have looked through the apache logs and system logs and > there is nothing obvious that is consuming all that memory. I know of the > server-status module for apache but that is only useful if you can get to > the server during the crash (I can't) and doesn't have any historical data. > > The issue occurs seemingly randomly, last time in the middle of the night > with little or no user traffic. Do you have a search engine scanning your web server?