---------------- BACKGROUND:

H, I have ASUS XP2600 , 512MB RAM, RedHat 9, MySQL 3.23.58, Apache 2.0.40 dedicated server 1 Ethernet card very fast internet connection, running 2 websites..

1. phpbb forum with 700MB database, 14000 registered members, 30-80 constant connected users.. In this forum photo attachments are so often used ..

2. media download site that serves mp3s and mpegs.. most downloaded files are 20-60MB mpegs.. I restricted the number of downloads to certain number and that count restarts in the beginning of every hour.. so every hour 0:00 minute, there is some rush for the users to download media files..

----------------- PROBLEM:

a) I was running the phpbb forum around 1-2 months on the fresh Redhat 9 installation without much of problem.. I moved to this server, so the database and attached files were already in massive size from the beginning.. The server was running very nice & smoothly..

b) I installed my downloads site, and the server started to have problem.. it started to crash once a day, and later on twice a day.. and 2-3 days later it started to become unresponsive almost every hour..

c) Firstly after a reboot its Free Memory starts at 350MB and quickly gets down to 5MB, and after that the CPU load average will start to increase reaching as high as 15-30.. After a while with high load average like that, it stays unresponsive, not answering any more HTTP requests, and the load average will come down to very low like 0.07 shown in below example..
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
00:57:07 up 2:06, 1 user, load average: 0.07, 0.02, 0.52
189 processes: 187 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 0.1% user 0.0% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 99.8% idle
Mem: 481556k av, 476376k used, 5180k free, 0k shrd, 1644k buff
323948k actv, 0k in_d, 10212k in_c
Swap: 979956k av, 559776k used, 420180k free 209020k cached

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME CPU COMMAND
3496 root 15 0 1192 1192 868 R 0.1 0.2 0:00 0 top
1 root 15 0 108 76 56 S 0.0 0.0 0:05 0 init
2 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 keventd
3 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 kapmd
4 root 34 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 ksoftirqd_CPU0
9 root 25 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 bdflush
5 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 kswapd
6 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 kscand/DMA
7 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:05 0 kscand/Normal
8 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 kscand/HighMem
10 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 kupdated
11 root 25 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 mdrecoveryd
15 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 kjournald
73 root 25 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 khubd
2258 root 17 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 kjournald
2596 root 15 0 196 156 112 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 syslogd
2600 root 15 0 60 4 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 klogd
2618 rpc 23 0 80 4 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 portmap
2637 rpcuser 25 0 80 4 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 rpc.statd
2704 root 25 0 56 4 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 apmd
2741 root 15 0 616 520 372 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 0 sshd
2756 root 24 0 152 4 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 xinetd
2768 root 25 0 164 4 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 safe_mysqld
2802 mysql 15 0 22844 7992 696 S 0.0 1.6 2:06 0 mysqld
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

d) or in many cases the mysqld becomes unresponsive, saying the /tmp/mysql.sock file cant be found.. "service mysqld restart" will restart the mysqld but it still doesn work until I do "killall -9 mysqld, killall -9 httpd, service mysqld start, service httpd start"..

Please help me on this issue, I have been trying to solve it by myself in last week trying to change different values in httpd.conf, my.conf .. it still persists becoming totally unresponsive every other hour or at least in 2-3 hours..

Thank you very much in advance,
Kun.

Is this a dual or SMP processor system?

it is a single processor system.

here are the configurations:

-------------------------------------------- /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf:

Timeout 300
KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
KeepAliveTimeout 15

<IfModule prefork.c>
StartServers 8
MinSpareServers 8
MaxSpareServers 20
MaxClients 50
MaxRequestsPerChild 30
</IfModule>

<IfModule worker.c>
StartServers 2
MaxClients 50
MinSpareThreads 8
MaxSpareThreads 20
ThreadsPerChild 15
MaxRequestsPerChild 10
</IfModule>

<IfModule perchild.c>
NumServers 5
StartThreads 5
MinSpareThreads 3
MaxSpareThreads 5
MaxThreadsPerChild 15
MaxRequestsPerChild 10
</IfModule>

LoadModule access_module modules/mod_access.so
LoadModule auth_module modules/mod_auth.so
LoadModule auth_anon_module modules/mod_auth_anon.so
LoadModule auth_dbm_module modules/mod_auth_dbm.so
LoadModule auth_digest_module modules/mod_auth_digest.so
LoadModule include_module modules/mod_include.so
LoadModule log_config_module modules/mod_log_config.so
LoadModule env_module modules/mod_env.so
LoadModule mime_magic_module modules/mod_mime_magic.so
LoadModule cern_meta_module modules/mod_cern_meta.so
LoadModule expires_module modules/mod_expires.so
LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so
LoadModule usertrack_module modules/mod_usertrack.so
LoadModule unique_id_module modules/mod_unique_id.so
LoadModule setenvif_module modules/mod_setenvif.so
LoadModule mime_module modules/mod_mime.so
LoadModule dav_module modules/mod_dav.so
LoadModule status_module modules/mod_status.so
LoadModule autoindex_module modules/mod_autoindex.so
LoadModule asis_module modules/mod_asis.so
LoadModule info_module modules/mod_info.so
LoadModule dav_fs_module modules/mod_dav_fs.so
LoadModule vhost_alias_module modules/mod_vhost_alias.so
LoadModule negotiation_module modules/mod_negotiation.so
LoadModule dir_module modules/mod_dir.so
LoadModule imap_module modules/mod_imap.so
LoadModule actions_module modules/mod_actions.so
LoadModule speling_module modules/mod_speling.so
LoadModule userdir_module modules/mod_userdir.so

<IfModule prefork.c>
LoadModule cgi_module modules/mod_cgi.so
</IfModule>

<IfModule worker.c>
LoadModule cgid_module modules/mod_cgid.so
</IfModule>



-------------------------------------------- /etc/my.cnf:

[mysqld]
datadir=/var/lib/mysql
set-variable = max_connections=100
set-variable = max_user_connections=75
set-variable = wait_timeout=15
set-variable = connect_timeout=5
set-variable = max_connect_errors=10
set-variable = thread_cache_size=16
set-variable = key_buffer_size=4M
set-variable = max_allowed_packet=4M
set-variable = table_cache=50
set-variable = join_buffer_size=1M
set-variable = record_buffer=1M
set-variable = sort_buffer=1M
set-variable = myisam_sort_buffer_size=4M
socket = /tmp/mysql.sock
skip-innodb

[mysql.server]
user=mysql
basedir=/var/lib

[safe_mysqld]
err-log=/var/log/mysqld.log
pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid
socket = /tmp/mysql.sock

[client]
socket = /tmp/mysql.sock

[mysqldump]
quick
set-variable = max_allowed_packet=4M

[myisamchk]
set-variable = key_buffer=8M
set-variable = sort_buffer=8M
set-variable = read_buffer=4M
set-variable = write_buffer=4M


-------------------------------------------- mysqladmin version:
[root@new root]# mysqladmin version -u root -p
Enter password:
mysqladmin Ver 8.23 Distrib 3.23.58, for redhat-linux-gnu on i386

Server version 3.23.58
Protocol version 10
Connection Localhost via UNIX socket
UNIX socket /tmp/mysql.sock
Uptime: 12 hours 22 sec

Threads: 1 Questions: 1255527 Slow queries: 49 Opens: 6647 Flush tables: 1 Open tables: 50 Queries per second avg: 29.048