I'm not sure if I have a problem with a memory leak (as my hosting company suggests), or if we both need to read http://linuxatemyram.com. Maybe you clever people can help us out?

This is a front-end webserver VM running essentially only nginx & php-fpm on RHEL 5.5. This server is powering Magento, a PHP eCommerce thinggy. The server is running in a shared environment, but we're changing that soon.

Anyway.. after a reboot the server runs just fine, but within a day it will grind itself into nothingness. Pages will take literally 2 minutes to load, CPU spikes like crazy, etc.. The console is even sluggish when I SSH in. It's like my whole server is being brought to its knees.

I've also been monitoring the DB server via top and tcpdumping incoming traffic. The DB stays idle for a good portion of that "slow" load time. When i start seeing queries coming from the front-end server, the page loads soon afterward.

Here are some stats after me logging in during a slow-down, after restarting php-fpm:

[mike@front01 ~]$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          5963       5217        745          0        192        314
-/+ buffers/cache:       4711       1252
Swap:         4047          4       4042


[mike@front01 ~]$ top
top - 11:38:55 up 2 days,  1:01,  3 users,  load average: 0.06, 0.17, 0.21
Tasks: 131 total,   1 running, 130 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu0  :  0.0%us,  0.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.3%id,  0.3%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu1  :  0.3%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.7%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu2  :  0.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,100.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu3  :  0.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,100.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   6106800k total,  5361288k used,   745512k free,   199960k buffers
Swap:  4144728k total,     4976k used,  4139752k free,   328480k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
31806 apache    15   0  601m 120m  37m S  0.0  2.0   0:22.23 php-fpm
31805 apache    15   0  549m  66m  31m S  0.0  1.1   0:14.54 php-fpm
31809 apache    16   0  547m  65m  32m S  0.0  1.1   0:12.84 php-fpm
32285 apache    15   0  546m  63m  33m S  0.0  1.1   0:09.22 php-fpm
32373 apache    15   0  546m  62m  32m S  0.0  1.1   0:09.66 php-fpm
31808 apache    16   0  543m  60m  35m S  0.0  1.0   0:18.93 php-fpm
31807 apache    16   0  533m  49m  30m S  0.0  0.8   0:08.93 php-fpm
32092 apache    15   0  535m  48m  27m S  0.0  0.8   0:06.67 php-fpm
 4392 root      18   0  194m  10m 7184 S  0.0  0.2   0:06.96 cvd
 4064 root      15   0  154m 8304 4220 S  0.0  0.1   3:55.57 snmpd
 4394 root      15   0  119m 5660 2944 S  0.0  0.1   0:02.84 EvMgrC
31804 root      15   0  519m 5180  932 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.46 php-fpm
 4138 ntp       15   0 23396 5032 3904 S  0.0  0.1   0:02.38 ntpd
  643 nginx     15   0 95276 4408 1524 S  0.0  0.1   0:01.15 nginx
 5131 root      16   0 90128 3340 2600 S  0.0  0.1   0:01.41 sshd
28467 root      15   0 90128 3340 2600 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.35 sshd
32602 root      16   0 90128 3332 2600 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.36 sshd
 1614 root      16   0 90128 3308 2588 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.02 sshd
 2817 root       5 -10  7216 3140 1724 S  0.0  0.1   0:03.80 iscsid
 4161 root      15   0 66948 2340  800 S  0.0  0.0   0:10.35 sendmail
 1617 nicole    17   0 53876 2000 1516 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.02 sftp-server
 ...

Is there anything else I should be looking at, or any more information that might be useful? I'm just a developer, but the slowdowns on this system worry me and make it hard to do my work..

Help me out, ServerFault!