Monday, October 22, 2012

High Swapping On Linode 512 - KeepAliveTimeout

I thought of sharing my experience on handling the high swapping issue I faced recently. There is nothing wrong with Linode service, its just my dumb Apache configurations.

Linode is a great hosting service but for a Linux administration newbie it can be a challenging place.

Swapping problem was a nightmare, I tried adding another 512MB to the Linode box and still it goes into full swap. Then I get to know about the Apache KeepAliveTimeout.

KeepAliveTimeout - Amount of time the server will wait for subsequent requests on a persistent connection.

Unfortunately for me the default value was 15 which is a super high value. After changing the value to 4 all was smooth again.

Swapping can occur for many reasons like bad scripting but KeepAliveTimeout value can be a main suspect :)

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