[CentOS] Machine becoming irresponsive

Mon Jan 23 13:39:45 UTC 2012
Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com>

There is a CentOS 5.2 machine that is sometimes found to be offline.
It runs a few websites but nothing very high traffic. I happened to
notice a few days ago that before it went down, one of the sites
written in PHP was throwing errors that it could not connect to the
MySQL backend. Two hours later, the whole server was down and wasn't
even responding to SSH.

It's not my box, but I may have opportunity to look at it. After going
through dmesg and messages, if I don't find anything obvious, what
should I start looking for? What are the likely, common culprits and
how to identify them? Is there a page of the fine manual that
addresses issues like this?

Thanks.

-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://gibberish.co.il
http://what-is-what.com