I've found the cause of the two recent outages - and the third one, which happened just now, but which was mercifully short because I was logged in to the server while it happened.
Trackback spam.
VAST amounts of trackback spam.
So much trackback spam that Apache locked up and wouldn't restart.
Trackbacks are turned off completely until I get it working in Minx. (Minx doesn't depend on Apache in that way, so it should cope.)
Meanwhile, we have accumulated a 250MB error log in three days, mostly from rejected trackback spam.
(For the technically minded, the load average hit 140 - and that's with the new trackback system in place. With standard MT trackbacks, the system would have been vaporized.)
Posted by Pixy Misa at July 21, 2006 02:06 PM | TrackBack