[SlugBug] sluggish server - 100% swapped out

[Chris J]

And Lo! The Great Prophet " Bill Best" uttered these words of wisdom:
> scenario - sluggish server
>
> questions - (i)what was going on/wrong?

Something was eating all the memory

>             (ii) did i do the right thing?

Usually things can be fixed without resorting to a reboot (unless it's the
kernel or hardware at fault)

>             (iii) if not, what should i have done?

Found out where the memory was going. From top press "M" (captial), this
sorts the process lists in terms of memory usage rather than CPU. Also
take note of the Memory sumamry above the process list, and look at the
buffers/cache usage. From here, it should then be relatively
straightforward to find the culprit.

>             (iv) what preventative action could i take?

Find the culprit, kill it. If it's a daemon, then it could indicate a bug,
or someone's fed the daemon something ugly to do. Another thing to observe
is find out if memory continues to be allocated. If it does, then
eventually the kernel will realise it's out of memory, and start the OOM
killer. Thet OOM killer usually manages to kill the offending application
(I have it do it occasionally when trn reads a dodgy .newsrc and it tries
to thread a few million articles).

If it's the kernel that's at fault, there's nowt you can do but reboot,
lest you want to try and debug the kernel...!

Chris...

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\ Chris Johnson                 \
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