hi,

i have a problem, i have a server set up running ubuntu 6.06.1 server and is running apache2, mysql, php, perl, the essentials for hosting, but after roughly 4 days after it becomes slow and mostly unresponsive on ssh, ftp and lastly apache2

the specs:

p4 2.40ghz
1gb ddr2 ram
160gb hard drive
3 1/2" floppy drive
52x cdrom drive
10/100 ethernet

any ideas? its becoming tedious for me to have to travel to the place where it is and physically cold boot it.

thank you in advance...

Check your logs. From time to time I used to see my home shell server get slow and after investigating a bit I noticed that it was getting hammered by script kiddies banging away at my openssh server.

When the server is slow, check your process list, top, and your log files to see what the problem is. Make sure to add the slow-query log to mysql as well to help diagnose those issues. What is actually slow? The whole server, one daemon? With the amount of data you have given us there is no way that we could properly diagnose the issue.

well, i know that the ssh server will always be bombed by script kiddies, i have taken care of this issue with denyhosts, same with the proftpd server as well.

the following servers become slow and unresponsive after 4 days:

openssh
proftpd

i havent noticed any decrease in performance over web/mysql yet. although i have ran into a time or 2 when apache2 did slow down

any configuration files u would like to see? logs too?

I doubt that I can help you, but I have a somewhat similar issue with a box running 6.06.1.

This box runs various services such as squid, dnsmasq, etc and I use it for a little light browsing. When originally installed, this was fine but now, after a day or two of running, memory leaks result in its performance being terrible (I don't just mean not very good - after 15 - 30 minutes trying to get it to shut down cleanly, I give up and hit the power switch). I also have a few out-and-out crashes, which was never the case when I used SuSE.

On this box, any browser (Opera, Konqueror, Firefox) leaks memory, albeit slightly slowly. Opera is probably the worst, perhaps because I tend to keep more tabs open in Opera. Akregator may well leak, too.

Given that there are various different programs affected and given that at one time 1 month+ uptimes were not a problem, I believe that one of the updates that I have done since installation has installed a flawed library.

Given that I don't hear of too many people complaining about this issue on Ubuntu (Kubuntu, really in my case) I wonder whether there is something different about my hardware: The obvious thing that comes to mind is that this is a dual-cpu box and that I use the server kernel, which probably isn't a popular Ubuntu combination, or at least wasn't when 6.06 was originally released. (I do hear of a few people with slackware having a similar memory leak problem, and a there is a suspicion that a particular version of X is involved - but its only a suspicion).

I've not panicked about this yet, because currently its not much more than an irritation. And when I get time, I'll rebuild (and of course do a fresh backup) this box and the problem is likely to go away. But if I had to travel to reboot, I admit that this would be rather more than just an irritation.

hmm, wonder if ubuntu or even debian is even wise to use these days for server software. i heard and read many times that rhel and centos are the two greatly secure linux distros out there, i wonder if this is a memory leak issue but i dunno right now, i checked my processes and it doesnt look like apache is taking too much ram despite i havent configured it to optimal settings yet to use less ram, but i also must advise that i simply do not use X on any server that i have setup in the past and present...