Look, this is emergency.
I woke up this morning and found I could not open my site. Also I reveived an alert mail from Linode

Your Linode, ***, has exceeded the notification threshold (90) for CPU Usage by averaging 368.8% for the last 2 hours.


I opened a ticket to the support team, here is the answer:
Hello -

Your Linode is OOMing, meaning something inside your node is consuming all of the available virtual memory. You can see this for yourself by logging into Lish and viewing the console:

http://library.linode.com/linode-manage ... shell.html

You'll need to identify the culprit and adjust its configuration to prevent it from happening again. Apache, mysql, and anti-spam software are the usual suspects. Please visit our community IRC channel if you need any help:

http://www.linode.com/irc/

Regards,
-Tom


Now I know what is going on, but I have no idea how to make up this, can somebody show me the way? Better be step by step.

Any answer will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!!!

No, it's not an emergency.

The answer was pretty self-explanatory in my opinion. You must find out what is eating your RAM by either looking at the system when it breaks or looking at your log files in the hopes that it is mentioned. Then you must reconfigure the offending service(s) to stop using so much RAM.

We can't even begin to help without knowing what size Linode you're using and what software you are running on it.

_________________
/ Peter

htop is a nice, intuitive visual tool that you can run to see what processes are using the most ram. It would be worth it to install that if you haven't already.

+1

_________________
If it ain't broke, you didn't tweak it enough. If it is broke, use more duct tape.
http://independentchaos.com

As other's have said, unless you're paying us, it's not an emergency for us. Sorry.


Sooooo.... Did you do that?

Today I've been told that my Linode is OOMing as well. I've logged into Lish and found the following:

Killed process 2158 (mysqld) total-vm:337352kB, anon-rss:25364kB, file-rss:0kB
Out of memory: Kill process 18663 (mysqld) score 83 or sacrifice child
Killed process 18663 (mysqld) total-vm:334244kB, anon-rss:22612kB, file-rss:0kB
Out of memory: Kill process 7819 (clamd) score 147 or sacrifice child
Killed process 7819 (clamd) total-vm:149856kB, anon-rss:90964kB, file-rss:0kB
Out of memory: Kill process 8241 (mysqld) score 101 or sacrifice child
Killed process 8241 (mysqld) total-vm:345568kB, anon-rss:24708kB, file-rss:0kB
Out of memory: Kill process 1499 (mysqld) score 79 or sacrifice child
Killed process 1499 (mysqld) total-vm:340564kB, anon-rss:14540kB, file-rss:0kB
Out of memory: Kill process 4920 (mysqld) score 80 or sacrifice child
Killed process 4920 (mysqld) total-vm:341636kB, anon-rss:17756kB, file-rss:0kB
Out of memory: Kill process 11230 (amavisd (ch16-a) score 74 or sacrifice child
Killed process 11230 (amavisd (ch16-a) total-vm:70560kB, anon-rss:0kB, file-rss:0kB
Out of memory: Kill process 8287 (mysqld) score 74 or sacrifice child
Killed process 8287 (mysqld) total-vm:340428kB, anon-rss:16444kB, file-rss:0kB
Out of memory: Kill process 11639 (mysqld) score 75 or sacrifice child
Killed process 11639 (mysqld) total-vm:340428kB, anon-rss:16704kB, file-rss:0kB
Out of memory: Kill process 9130 (amavisd (virgin) score 68 or sacrifice child
Killed process 9130 (amavisd (virgin) total-vm:65776kB, anon-rss:0kB, file-rss:0kB
Out of memory: Kill process 11656 (mysqld) score 102 or sacrifice child
Killed process 11656 (mysqld) total-vm:349616kB, anon-rss:13904kB, file-rss:0kB
Out of memory: Kill process 15532 (mysqld) score 95 or sacrifice child
Killed process 15532 (mysqld) total-vm:341392kB, anon-rss:18756kB, file-rss:0kB

What can I do to get Mysql to stop this..?

Here's an iostat if it helps..

%MEM %CPU   RSS    VSZ COMMAND
 6.4  0.3 32700  73832 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
 6.4  0.1 32824  72176 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
 6.2  0.2 31612  72032 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
 5.8  2.0 29536  68376 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
 5.7  0.2 29300  69928 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
 5.7  0.0 29364  65900 amavisd (ch2-avail)
 2.9  0.4 14852  57672 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
 1.5  0.0  7764  65916 amavisd (ch1-avail)
11.2  0.2 57092 340628 /usr/sbin/mysqld
 1.1  0.0  5692  22972 /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/sbin/psad

MySQL isn't the culprit, it's only using 11.2% of your RAM. Apache is the problem, using 33.4% of RAM in that screenshot, and probably more processes not in that list. Either get more RAM or reconfigure Apache by reducing the number of processes (search these forums for maxclients). At your memory usages, 10 to 15 is probably a sensible value for it.