Hi All

My server keeps coming to a crawl. Viewing the apache status shows that apache is getting stuck on the reading request mode. I've been searching all day for a solution and found none, and contacted my ISP (6 hours ago!?) without any hint of a reply.


Server uptime: 16 minutes 23 seconds
Total accesses: 22898 - Total Traffic: 59.0 MB
CPU Usage: u18.18 s4.44 cu4.59 cs.71 - 2.84% CPU load
23.3 requests/sec - 61.4 kB/second - 2700 B/request
146 requests currently being processed, 4 idle servers

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Any ideas?

Is this your own dedicated server or you have a hosting account? If your just paying for hosting, it's most likely out of your hands and you're sharing this server with hundreds of other people paying for hosting services. I'd say, bug the hosting provider of the issue, that load seems a little too high, there's clearly a problem.

It's my own dedicated server, normally it's instant page views.

Are you sure about that? Make sure it's not some virtual server as a dedicated server.

Also what do you have set for your limits in your httpd.conf file for apache? Have you tried restarting it? Anything else running on the system we should know about?

And a server uptime of only 16 minutes worries me. Did you reboot it? Find out what's hitting your server cause something that gets hit that fast after a reboot would make me think it's a DoS attack of some type or your machine got hacked and they're using it for other things.

I've been rebooting it because once all of them get stuck at reading requests, then it stops accepting new requests. So I've been basically doing a restart every hour or so for most of today trying to figure out what the problem is.

I think it might be getting DoS'd but I'm unsure how to figure that out. Yes it is a dedicated server and I'm the only one on it. I have ScanAlert scan it daily and a software firewall. I have no reason to believe it's been hacked.

Never assume such things. It's on a network accessible to the world, don't rule it out til you have that confirmed.

I'd suggest shutting down apache. If the problem persists, it's not just apache. Look for suspicious processes, etc. Download a chrootkit and scan your system. Check literally everything and I'd confirm it's not a virtual machine. I said this in another thread, if you're paying $100-$200 a month for a dedicated server, you most likely got yourself a virtual machine. No hosting provider gives out thousand dollar machines for cheap prices on a monthly basis. I go in with a few friends at a colo to host our own servers and we pay over $380 a month for only a 1/3 of a rack, we have to supply our own servers.

The only thing that is affected is Apache. It's not a virtual machine, it's a $500+ dedicated server from The Planet. Of course they finally reply, and when they check it out everything is going great and they can't find anything in the error logs (which I couldn't either)

What are the possible things that could happen that would make Apache get stuck reading the request? Is it just waiting for the sender to send the request, and if so is there a way to shorten the time it waits for a request?