hi,

My linode was running fine this morning when suddenly it went down and I rebooted but now it has persistant out of memory errors. On reboot I get some of the following errors:

hwclock is unable to get I/O port access: the iopl(3) call failed.
error receiving uevent message: No buffer space available
mounting local filesystems: fail

After it boots it performs so slowly that I can barely log in or run any commands. I managed to run free -m and it said there were 3mb of free memory and the swap space was totally used.

I am VERY new to linux and need help figuring out what is wrong and how to fix it.

other details

I finally was able to run ps and discovered 52+ instances of apache2 -k start

killing them freed my memory but when I tried to restart apache I got a lot of instances of apache again!

ideas?

hmm...

additional information. we're on popsci.com today so the out of memory problems seem to be linked to getting too many hits or something?

You probably need to adjust ServerLimit in your Apache config to limit the amount of servers, otherwise Apache could be starting up more servers than you have memory to handle.