[cobalt-users] RAQ2: File system full & no swap space left

[Jeremy Mackeldey <jeremy@xxxxxxxx>]

Hello friends,

i had some really severe problems on my RAQ2 machine today. The RAQ had 
been running from August until today, where we only have HTTP, SMTP/POP, 
FTP, mySQL and PHP running.It is running with 64MB of RAM and had started 2 
weeks ago giving me 3-4 times a day that message, that memory were low and 
i should consider adding more DRAM to the server. Now today i suddenly 
realized mySQL dieing, when also Perl stopped and i received the message 
that cron was out of memory and the monitor reported that the file system 
was almost full (we had still quite some space left on the drives). i 
managed to login via SSH and looked up the resources, where "FREE" showed 
me, that the 130 MB swap file was completely full and the free ram had gone 
down to 1 MB. Suddenly all commands i entered simply died with" 
segmentation fault", bus error and other messages. i was not able to enter 
any command (not even ls), nor could i logon for a while. because also the 
PAM module told me that it did not have enough memory i saw in the logfile 
later.

After a while the system accepted the shudown command which rebooted the 
machine. now my question is: has anybody else experienced a problem like 
that? Why did swap fill up completely ? Is there a bug in one of the system 
commands which led to this filling up of swap in these 7 months since i had 
booted the last time? How can i free up swap space myself if it fills up 
that enourmous again? I had uploaded secure copies of ps and netstat to my 
system (before i rebooted a few days ago ) and could not see any processes 
i did not know, so i do not think that some evil process was doing this.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards and TIA

Jeremy