On 6/30/11, Giovanni Tirloni <gtirloni at sysdroid.com> wrote: > I would approach this issue from another perspective: who's locking up the > server (as in eating all resources) and how to stop/constrain it. You can > try to renice the sshd process and see what happens. I'm not entirely sure > what 'locked up' means in this context. Server's unresponsive to the external world. It isn't dead, on two occasions, when it happened at times like Sunday and 1am in the night, I could afford to wait it out and see that it eventually does recover from whatever it was. It's almost definitely related to disk i/o due to the VM guest fighting over the disks where their virtual disk-files are. However, the hard part is figuring out the exact factors, I know CPU isn't an issue having set up scripts to log top output when load goes above 5.