This is my first time configuring a VPS server and I'm having a few issues. We're running Wordpress on a 1GB Centos server configured per the internet (online research). No custom queries or anything crazy but closing in on 8K posts. At arbitrary intervals, the server just goes down. From the client side, it just says "Loading..." and will spin more or less indefinitely. On the server side, the shell will lock completely. We have to do a hard reboot from the control panel and then everything is fine.

Watching "top" I see it hovering between 35 - 55% memory usage generally and occasional spikes up to around 80%. When I saw it go down, there were about 30 - 40 Apache processes showing which pushed memory over the edge. "error_log" tells me that maxclients was reached right before each reboot instance. I've tried tinkering with that but to no avail.

I think we'll probably need to bump the server up to the next RAM level but with ~120K pageviews per month, it seems like that's a bit overkill since it was running fairly well on a shared server before.

Any ideas? httpd.conf and my.cnf values to add? I'll update this with the current ones if that helps.

Thanks in advance! This has been a fun and important learning experience but, overall, quite frustrating!

Edit: quick top snapshot:

top - 15:18:15 up 2 days, 13:04, 1 user, load average: 0.56, 0.44, 0.38 Tasks: 85 total, 2 running, 83 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 6.7%us, 3.5%sy, 0.0%ni, 89.6%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.1%si, 0.0%st Mem: 2051088k total, 736708k used, 1314380k free, 199576k buffers Swap: 4194300k total, 0k used, 4194300k free, 287688k cached