many httpd failed

[hdeya]

I'm getting many httpd failed emails, so what's the cause of this ??
and how can I fix it ?

[thisisit3]

you probably have too little memory.

something like a bot (googlebot, yahoo slurp, etc) or even lots of users can cause apache to die on a VPS with little memory.

check the QoS limits and see if your fail count is over zero:

# cat /proc/user_beancounters

[hdeya]

here are the results :

                                                 
       uid  resource           held    maxheld    barrier      limit    failcnt
       115: kmemsize        9010376    9278551   65536000   65536000          0
            lockedpages           0          4       4096       4096          0
            privvmpages      140702     144500     393216     393216          0
            shmpages            731        731     131072     131072          0
            dummy                 0          0          0          0          0
            numproc              92         95        400        400          0
            physpages         75409      79101          0 2147483647          0
            vmguarpages           0          0     147456 2147483647          0
            oomguarpages      75409      79101     147456 2147483647          0
            numtcpsock           33         36        500        500          0
            numflock             11         12        200        220          0
            numpty                2          2         64         64          0
            numsiginfo            0          1        512        512          0
            tcpsndbuf        398364     398364   32768000   36864000          0
            tcprcvbuf        540672     524288   32768000   36864000          0
            othersockbuf      39360      57468   32768000   36864000          0
            dgramrcvbuf           0          0     262144     262144          0
            numothersock         33         39        500        500          0
            dcachesize       705373     747781    4192304    4317184          0
            numfile            4192       4311      15000      15000     139724
            dummy                 0          0          0          0          0
            dummy                 0          0          0          0          0
            dummy                 0          0          0          0          0
            numiptent           294        294        400        400          0

so, what's wrong ?

[thisisit3]

The problem is here:
numfile 4192 4311 15000 15000 139724

you are hitting the number of open files your VPS is allowed to have.

unfortunately, numfiles is a limiting factor that affects all VPS systems when they have enough memory, its basically the next limiting factor that the hosting provider uses to limit your VPS.

The 10,000 open file limit is very small, considering small desktop linux system uses that much when running average applications.

Open a support ticket and ask them to raise your numfile limit to 20,000 or more, and while you are at it, raise numiptent to something like 1000 or 1500, so you have enough free rules to run iptables properly (automatic bans with BFD, etc).

Jag's support will always be happy to raise the limits to reasonable values for you

[thisisit3]

oh forgot one more thing, make sure your apache and your executed applications are not doing anything wrong, just in case you have slow MySQL queries or PHP scripts with infinite loops.