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Probably your Web server OOMing the box? Check dmesg.

Apache-specific advice: if you're on a small VPS or other box with not much RAM, and didn't tweak the distribution defaults for MaxClients and friends in its configuration, a HN-size load will OOM you rapidly, especially with mod_php. The defaults for prefork MPM are nuts in the major distros (as in, assuming 4 GB of RAM or more for mod_php).

Since you're going up and down, I assume this is the case. I suggest dropping MaxClients to 5 for now and letting us wait a bit.

Yeah, i thought i had it back up, went in to a meeting, came back and it's down. When i went in and looked at it there were a ton of apache2 processes. It's my blog server, so i don't pay a lot of attention to it, i probably should.

I dropped down the number of preforked apache processes, we'll see if that helps. It's also where i run some rails experiments, so we'll see. Load's back up to 7...

I had no idea hacker news got a lot of traffic.

The hard drive filled up and mysql corrupted a table. It's fixed now.

The subject line is so tempting, I upvoted while waiting for you:)

Thanks! G'Luck