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One of my Linux web servers recently ran out of memory, hung itself in an OOM kill frenzy, and had to be rebooted. This is a 512 MB VPS, but it has been running without problems since it was set up months ago. How can I prevent this from happening again?

I have not been able to find out from the logs which process was the cause. The processes killed were mysqld followed by apache2. Based on what's running on the box, I think it's likely that something went wrong in one of the Django applications (running under apache and mod_wsgi). Would limit the stack size (with the stack-size option to wsgi) help? Is is possible to limit wsgi or python or apache's memory usage in general? (The answers to this question say no.)

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Vebjorn Ljosa
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Don't run your WSGI application in embedded mode with prefork MPM if you are, use daemon mode instead so number of processes limited. Read:

http://blog.dscpl.com.au/2009/03/load-spikes-and-excessive-memory-usage.html

In version 4.0 of mod_wsgi, so long as you are using daemon mode, you can restrict memory of individual processes if operating system supports it.

Graham Dumpleton
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