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my VPS just ran out of RAM and I was forced to reboot it since I wasn't even able to ssh in.

My question is where should I look at (logs, etc) to find out which process was responsibile for the RAM burst?

Thanks.

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3 Answers

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Unless you see something in /var/log/messages (or some other file in /var/log - look around) you blew your chance: By rebooting you destroyed any state information your system had, and now you need to wait for the problem to happen again.

If you suspect a RAM leak I suggest monitoring your RAM/Swap usage and noting any processes that appear to be growing over time.

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up vote 1 down vote

When you can login, type top and press M (you can also do it with atop, htop, ...)

If you want to check the size (in kiloBytes) instead of percentage:

# ps -eo rss,pid,user,cmd --sort -rss | head
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Good procedure, but he needs the problem to happen again first. Might be beneficial to leave a terminal open running top so when the system blows up again that screen can be consulted. – voretaq7♦ Aug 30 '11 at 16:27
up vote 1 down vote

You should use a metric collection system like Munin or Cacti for historical graphing of your services.

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+1 for general sanity: properly configured monitoring & alerting will also warn you before the problem becomes so serious that you can't log in (say 80% of swap in use, or 80% of RAM if you have no swap) – voretaq7♦ Aug 30 '11 at 16:28

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