Dying services due to low memory?

["Ralf G. R. Bergs" <rabe@RWTH-Aachen.DE>]

Hi there,

can anyone point me to a solution for the following problem?

I have several machines running as Internet servers, mainly FTP and HTTP. 
They're relatively low-end machines (P100 and 486-133 with 48 resp. 64 MB 
RAM.) Every couple of days I have to restart inetd or other stand-alone 
services (like syslogd, klogd, snmpd, apache.)

I'm pretty sure the reason why the processes fail is that memory usage is 
too high (it's *definitely* not due to memory problems, like failing RAM 
modules or overclocked CPUs.) Memory usage is permanently about 99%, swap 
usage only a few percent. But obviously processes are dying because they 
can't allocate "real" memory?!

Of course a work-around would be to reduce the no. of concurrent FTP users 
that I allow, but I cannot easily do that. I simply cannot accept that 
services die as easily as they do. Isn't there a way to prevent this? I need 
a high availability of my machines, and having to constantly check and 
possibly restart services is not acceptable. :-(

Thanks,

Ralf


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