I'm trying to run some pretty intense scripts on my server & it uses up a lot, a lot, of memory. So much so that I think the kernel turns off sshd. I'm remote to logging in over ssh is crucial.

How can I keep sshd up or test if it is running and if not start it again?

/puzzled

Write a script that checks for sshd, if it's not present, restart it. Stick it in cron and have it run every 5 minutes or so..

You also probably want to de-intensify your script.

Putting some sleep statements in it will likely help.

Does the script do anything like a for or while loop that spawns background processes? This will kill your CPU rather than your memory. Putting sleeps inside loops definitely helps.

e.g.

while true
do ls -lR / &
done

Would peg your CPU rather quickly. Whereas:

while true
do ls -lR / &
sleep 300
done

Would tell it to wait 5 minutes between each ls -lR /. Not saying you should have sleeps of 300 between everything. It depends a lot on what you're running. Doing sleep 1 would probably be sufficient if you were doing "ps" (with no flags) in the loop. If you were doing "ps -ef" you'd probably want to do a sleep 5 instead.

The sleep doesn't necessarily have to be in a loop. Also any time you background in the script it is going to do that then immediately proceed to the next item. Simply taking out the & that does the backgrounding of the items will make the next item wait until the first is done.