Process eats all available memory, choking server

Virtualmin
1

On a relatively new Virtualmin Pro install on CentOS 5:

I was in the middle of following the process described at http://doxfer.com/Webmin/ApacheWebserver#Password_protecting_a_directory.
When I got to step 9 and clicked ‘Save’ my server became almost totally unresponsive. I was logged in via ssh as well, so I ran top and found that “/usr/libexec/webmin/apache/save_dir.cgi” was using 95% of the server’s 1G memory. 17 minutes after that process started, and is still consuming 78% of memory and doing goodness knows what to the server.

This is very disconcerting. What is going on?

UPDATE:
I killed the offending process. Webmin was no longer running after I did that. I don’t know whether it was running before I killed the process. I certainly did not do anything to stop webmin before I killed the process.

In any event, I then restarted webmin. None of the changes that I had made on the Access Control page had been saved. I made precisely the save changes again. This time there was no problem when I saved. So, regrettably, the problem is not reproducable.

It is not clear whether the fact that webmin was stopped was the result of the memory consuming process or the cause of it. If it was the latter, I have no idea what would have caused it to stop.<br><br>Post edited by: otis, at: 2007/10/30 12:44

2

I’m also having problems with my server going extremely slow.

I reinstalled CentOS, installed Webmin, then used the wget command for my licensed version to setup Virtualmin. Everything installed beautifully and I haven’t had any problems creating my websites since then.

Unfortunately though with the install came a major slowdown on my server.

Perl is using 93.9 M
lookup-domain-daemon.pl is using 59.4 M
Mysqld is using 165.4 M

With only 512 mb ram on an old system, it’s killing me. Is there something to do in Virtualmin to knock those numbers down?

3

You can reduce the amount of RAM Webmin uses by editing /etc/webmin/miniserv.conf and removing the preload= line, then running /etc/webmin/restart . However, this will come at the cost of some speed, as that memory is used to pre-cache scripts.

I can’t really comment on reducing MySQL’s memory usage though. However, 512M is probably a little on the low side for a virtual hosting box - I’d recommend 1GB if possible.

4

Here’s the documentation for Virtualmin on low memory systems:

http://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/id,virtualmin_on_low_memory_systems/