Update! I may have solved the problem by adding a swap file. I think the problem was caused by me leaving half-written pages open and the drafts slowly filling up my RAM… maybe. Memory usage is looking much better now though, I’ll keep an eye out in the meantime but I’m hoping this is the last I’ll see of this problem. Of course, if even the swap file fills up then I have a bigger problem on my hands.
Writing stuff in a command line interface feels really cool by the way, assuming it actually works, making me feel like a hacker in a Hollywood movie.
You can read about the results from the next day here (Part 2)
Not as fun as I thought
So I don’t know what’s going on with these spikes. I thought it was due to brute-force attacks (there were many) but this was still occurring even after I added the safeguards. Checking the logs there wasn’t even anyone trying to access the server when it hung at 100% CPU, leading me to believe the culprit is internal, but I can’t figure out what. I’ve spent several hours checking but found nothing suspicious (to my inexperienced self, at least).
I don’t know how to read the access.log very well, so there might actually be something wrong, but it’s all far too complicated for me, setting up a proper logger and whatnot. I am way out of my depth here and am considering going back to managed hosting providers if only I could find a decent one that didn’t cost $30/month for a website of my scale. Now I know why people still pay for these services, for someone like me with no expertise it’s a nightmare.
I’ll be honest, I’ve been getting painful headaches whenever I read about server admin stuff which is discouraging me from reading further. There’s just something about reading pages and pages filled with incomprehensible jargon that really throws me off.
And now I’m dizzy as I’m writing this after reading about mysql and processes being terminated due to oom or something.
I really didn’t think things would get this complicated. From brute-force hackers and my questionable installations and configurations to prevent them I’m not sure which one was worse for my server. Oh well. Let’s see how things go from here on out, though I expect nothing to magically improve on its own.