Http Problem

[Nibb]

Since yesteday im having this weard problem, i ordered my server a long time ago, a more than a year, it always worked perfect, it was up all the time, but every 2 o 3 months the server did hang up, i could not access websites so i just logged the control panel and rebooted the server, and then all was fine again, i did this only 2 o 3 times on year, thats perfect normal since rebotting a sever from time to time is not a problem. But since yesteday im having this problem like 4 times in the last 24 hours, my monitoing service is alerting me that the HTTP time out, then i log in and reboot the server, and after 2 hours or so again, the same problem, its some http error, becasue the ping to the server works, email, etc, i even can log in my plesk to reboot the server, but websites cannot be access, it just gives time out, what could this be? Is the server old? What diagnostic can i do when this happens again the see whats happening? Or does the server overload or waht? regards

[fastduke]

Are you getting more traffic than before?

you might want to check out these in your apache config :
MaxKeepAliveRequests
MaxSpareServers
MaxClients

look for runaway cgi processes and see if something is hogging the box.

[Nibb]

Yes i think so, im getting more traffic, but i have only 4 o 5 domains with traffic, only 3 have 40 GB transfer per month or so, that should not to much for a linux server since i hear people have 250 and more on the same box. But i think it has to do with somehting you said, how can i do this steps you say?
SB Support, also replied and said the problem could be this, i have my dns.domain.com pointing directly to SB DNs ip so my clients see my domain but they actually use SB DNS, support says that is causing an error on the server, but for a 1 year now i never had problems, what do you thing guys, could this cause this? And should i configure my own dns.
regards

[WestBendWeb]

You need to edit your httpd.conf and alter the settings already given to you. My server for example has 250 Max Clients and still gets bogged down everytime one of those sites gets a link from a major media site.

FYI :
You hear other people say 250 sites but not what kind of sites nor how much traffic those sites generate. So I would not necessarily compare yourself to other hosts by client numbers. They could be small html based sites that get less than 1 gb per month. All of your sites could be php based with badly written sql queries that when the traffic arrives bogs down the server from mysql queries as well as apache requests.

You need to try and dig into what is bogging down the server. One possible method is to use the command top (man top)
you could also download and use this toolkit: http://www.trafficg.com/mysql/
which is fantastic for capturing queries over a time period to look at them as well as system variables and processes.