Hello, I am having issues on a relatively new server whereby the CPU will spike and the whole server will crash and Virtualmin will fail to serve any websites (page not found etc), and you are unable to access the Virtualmin gui at the same time. When this happens, I can ssh into the server, and reboot it - This resolves the issues for another couple of weeks (max) and then I’ll get alerts to say all of the websites are offline again (from my uptime monitoring software) and I’ll have to ssh into it and reboot it.
The server is a VM droplet hosted on DigitalOcean. The DigitalOcean statistics show that average CPU% over 24hrs will usually not peak anything above 20%. Memory usage never rises above 50% used, and bandwidth to and from the server is minimal so I know there is no DDOS attack or similar. When the issue occurs the DigitalOcean stats show CPU running at between 80-100%, the memory stays the same (approx. 50%), but the Disk IO jumps up to 150MB/s whereas is usually sat below 50MB/s.
The VM is a Standard with 2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM, 80GB SSD and is running Debian 10.3.
The server is hosting approx. 12 wordpress websites – all small business sites, nothing with large files or a high amount of traffic (in the past I’ve run many more sites with less VM resources without any issues).
When it does crash, I have little time to troubleshoot and gather logs as I just need to get the websites back online as quickly as possible (and rebooting the whole server is the quickest way).
Below are the server details from the Virtualmin dashboard:
System hostname web-1.
Operating system Debian Linux 10
Webmin version 1.942
Usermin version 1.791
Virtualmin version 6.09 Authentic theme version 19.46
Time on system Friday, July 10, 2020 11:07 AM
Kernel and CPU Linux 4.19.0-9-cloud-amd64 on x86_64
Processor information Intel® Xeon® CPU E5-2630L v2 @ 2.40GHz, 2 cores
System uptime 1 hours, 55 minutes
Running processes 162 CPU load averages 0.40 (1 min) 0.39 (5 mins) 0.27 (15 mins)
Real memory 1.3 GiB used / 1.71 GiB cached / 3.85 GiB total
Local disk space 10.8 GiB used / 67.9 GiB free / 78.71 GiB total
I previously had a Virtualmin server hosted on Linode on Ubuntu 14 and that ran flawlessly for 3 or 4 years that was hosting approx 20 websites. However, this new server on DigitalOcean has been doing this since day one (approx. 3 months ago). We have many other servers used for other purposes (PBX systems, File Storage etc) on DigitalOcean, and they are mostly Debian10 as well as these run fine.
We take a backup every night using the Virtualmin GUI to send copies of the websites to an FTP server.
I suspect there’s something broken in the Virtualmin setup somewhere but I am unsure as to where to look next to try and pin it down…?