The original post: /r/debian by /u/keldrin_ on 2024-12-24 11:30:27.

Hi!

I have a VPS server running nextcloud on debian. For some reason, it becomes really slow and unresponsive every 3-4 days and I have to (hard) reboot it from my provider’s webinterface.

Last time that happened I managed to log in before it died completely and found a lot of processes that should not be there.

Here is the heavily edited and commented output of ps aux on the server just before I had to reboot it:

USER         PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
# main suspect: the cron job
# appears 54 times in the process list 
root       29559  0.0  0.0   5464   884 ?        D    Dec22   0:00 sync
root       32255  0.0  0.0   8500  2768 ?        S    Dec22   0:00 /usr/sbin/CRON -f
root       32256  0.0  0.0   2576   884 ?        Ss   Dec22   0:00 /bin/sh -c sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

# comes in variations
# just one example, there are more variations
root       46397  0.0  0.0   5464   880 ?        D    Dec22   0:00 sync
root       46591  0.0  0.0 167892  5052 ?        Ss   Dec22   0:00 (tmpfiles)
root       46592  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        D    Dec22   0:00 [(sd-mkdcreds)]
root       47908  0.0  0.0   8500  2768 ?        S    Dec22   0:00 /usr/sbin/CRON -f
root       47909  0.0  0.0   2576   940 ?        Ss   Dec22   0:00 /bin/sh -c sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

# loads of rogue apaches
# i guess OOM kill and respawn 
# Body count: 74
www-data   87487  0.0  1.5 400920 92612 ?        S    Dec23   0:31 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

I really don’t know what’s going on.

Both the mariadb database and nextcloud data partition are on LUKS encrypted LVM containers, formatted with ext4. Maybe some interference here?