cron.daily high IO/SWAP usage
I have a Linode 512 that uses about 200M idle. Cron.daily runs at about 6.30AM and it's giving me some issues. With about 300M left I don't see how the daily cronjobs can give so much trouble. I also don't know which particular cronjob is causing this. Here's a screenshot:
As you can see, it starts swapping and has a little IO-peak. Does that mean that something is eating up all my RAM during the cronjob?
While this one was no huge issue, sometimes it uses more. This causes mainly apache to go OOM, and restart. I'd rather not have this all the time.
Does anyone know what causes this and how I can fix it? I'm running Debian 6, here's the cronjobs:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 633 Apr 1 08:40 apache2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 14799 Apr 15 2011 apt
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 77 Jun 19 2009 apt-show-versions
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 314 Aug 12 2011 aptitude
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 502 Jun 17 2010 bsdmainutils
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 256 Apr 26 2011 dpkg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 89 Apr 17 2010 logrotate
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1335 Jan 3 2011 man-db
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 606 Nov 4 2009 mlocate
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 7628 Nov 27 2010 mod-pagespeed
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1154 Oct 17 2010 ntp
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 249 Feb 15 2011 passwd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3594 Dec 19 2010 standard
I first thought that the mlocate caused it, but I disabled that one and it's still doing it :/
Thanks,
4 Replies
@obs:
That graph you posted doesn't show swapping, it barely shows any disk activity at all. Don't worry about it. FYI it's probably logrotate.
The reason I worry about it is because apache restarts at the same time as that cronjob runs, which makes me thinks it goes oom & restarts to free up memory.