[cobalt-users] Re: memory problems

[Bruce Timberlake <bruce@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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> My cobalt has been pretty unstable lately... It's locked me out from
> logging in via SSH and through the web interface a couple times but was
> still processing data, last week it locked up completly - It's patched and
> upto date and doesnt have enough exposure to ring a hack attack.

Are you getting any CPU overutilization emails from Active Monitor (e.g., 
maybe you've got a job that's sucking up all the resources)?  Do you have any 
customers on the server that might have poorly written CGIs or database 
searches that could be thrashing away for a long time?

> I've noticed that the swap will stay at 0% until the box is under a
> serious load, till the physical memory is maxed out... Then it seems to
> take days to slowly release it's swap.

That's normal AFAIK, although I can't put my finger on an explanation at the 
moment.

What is causing the "serious load"? Could this be related to your lack of 
login capabilities?

> There is no load on the machine at the moment yet it's only got 19MB of
> it's physical memory free. There is no memory stored in the buffer cache,
> is that abnormal?

No, that's normal Unix caching... It keeps data around in memory for quite a 
while, on the off chance something might need it again. It's not doing any 
harm; having RAM sitting around unused is "wasteful" of resources. If 
something does need RAM, older cached info will be dumped as needed to make 
room for it.
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