(I wrote this at 3:20 AM so if anything doesn't make sense I apologize lol, i'll correct it in the morning)

Past 4 days I've been talking with Support trying to figure out the problem. I've constantly hit the memory usage max, been in the Black zone, and MaxClients are being hit. I've installed WP-Super-Cache, it helped with Load Average (which is usually around 0) but not memory issues. My site will fly one minute and then grind to a halt the next.

For example, tonight at 2:30 AM Central my site was at 100% Memory Usage, in the Black Zone, and was taking 10+ minutes to load, it did this 3 or 4 times tonight. Now it's 3 AM and everything is perfectly fine. Support increased MaxClients to 25 but it still gets hit and he doesn't want to increase it anymore, they're suggesting that I go Dedicated but I'm not sure my site (or wallet) is ready for that.

I checked through SSH and saw that "spamd" is taking up the most memory, what is spamd??

23808 root      16   0 27604  24m 2288 S    0  4.8   0:00.51 spamd
23815 popuser   16   0 27604  23m 1024 S    0  4.6   0:00.00 spamd
28481 apache    16   0 39992  21m 3100 S    0  4.2   0:01.04 httpd
24393 apache    16   0 39944  21m 3092 S    0  4.1   0:00.85 httpd
32639 apache    16   0 39576  20m 3096 S    0  4.1   0:00.43 httpd
29986 apache    16   0 39544  20m 3088 S    0  4.1   0:00.43 httpd
32636 apache    16   0 39536  20m 3088 S    0  4.1   0:00.42 httpd

I get 900-1000 visits a day, it's not a very busy site, at the most I've had on the site at one time was maybe 50 and that was rare. I'm just lost because I don't know what the problem is, I moved my site from *another company* Shared plan with absolutely no downtime for a year (until they shut me down for server load issues) to a VPS Server and now my site runs crappier?

I want to explain a little bit about what's on my site so you can tell me if this is what's causing the problems.

http://www.RockItPro.com

It's a Wordpress blog site for my Hip-Hop beats, as you can see I have 7 "blog entries" (or beat entries) down the middle of the page on each of the 35 pages, so each page has to load:

1) 7 Podpress players (a plugin)
2) 7 WP-Ratings ( a plugin)
3) 14 "L" and "E" icons (with Javascript enabled you can hover over those L and E icons and a box will popup)
4) Top 10 Beats (a php call from the WP-Ratings plugin)
5) Latest Posts (SF-Forum plugin, this takes up quite a bit of queries)

Is all this just too much? Would all this stuff cause Memory Usage issues or would it be something else?

Here's the code I put in for each beat blog entry:


I don't know what info to give you guys to help you help me lol, so just ask me what you need and I'll post it here.

Thanks for the reply. I don't use e-mail on my server (like help@rockitpro.com) but people do contact me through my website which uses a Contact plugin that sends an email directly to my Gmail account, and I also get e-mails when people sign up to my site and post comments, will disabling pop3/imap affect those things?

Where do I disable the e-mail functions? I went to Server>Service Management and I see SMTP Server (QMail) and IMAP/POP3 Server (Courier-IMAP), should I disable both of those? Or do I do it through Virtuozzo? I just need to know exactly what to disable, thanks.

Ok, thanks. I disabled IMAP and spamd yesterday. I'm looking in my QoS Alerts this morning and see:

Feb 17, 2009 07:23:55 AM    Black zone    privvmpages
Feb 17, 2009 07:18:45 AM    Black zone    privvmpages
Feb 17, 2009 07:18:14 AM    Red   zone       privvmpages
Feb 17, 2009 07:13:05 AM    Black zone       privvmpages


And I had numerous other Black zones between 5 am and 7 am. It just doesn't make sense to me why the site runs fine during the day usually and even during prime time USA hours but at 4-7 AM in the morning I get red and black zones. Is it normal for a VPS to hit the red/black like this?

I haven't scheduled anything (don't even know how) so there's nothing going on like that that I know of.

Today (the 19th) has been good so far, only green and yellow all day and my site has been fast. I'm going to keep picking away at my site and try to find out what's going on.