I have an Ubuntu 12.04 LEMP server with shop app ontop, running MySQL 5.5 as DB (currently since this problem started I've already switched to Percona with no success).
So, current facts: every night my monitoring tells me that the server is not responsive. Exact time varies. It can be down for several minutes, or even couple of hours. It can start at around 1 in the night or at any other time up through 5. Munin and atop shows that at this time iowait takes all resources, used disk space increases in steps by ~2Gb. Even up to taking all space available.
Mysql slow query log shows nothing. No slow queries at the time.
Web server log shows no special activity - just general web site use, static, shop, products, products listings. Nothing extra.
There are no entries in cron that might be executed at that time and that might do anything with DB.
Mysql SHOW EVENTS
is empty on all databases. MySQL error log (with warnings logging enabled) has nothing at a time. Something appears there but only when disk is full, such as:
151028 4:03:54 [ERROR] Got an error from unknown thread, /mnt/workspace/percona-server-5.5-debian-binary/label_exp/ubuntu-precise-64bit/percona-server-5.5-5.5.45-rel37.4/storage/myisam/mi_write.c:226
151028 4:03:54 [ERROR] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Incorrect key file for table '/tmp/#sql_5e90_21.MYI'; try to repair it
151028 4:03:54 [ERROR] Got an error from unknown thread, /mnt/workspace/percona-server-5.5-debian-binary/label_exp/ubuntu-precise-64bit/percona-server-5.5-5.5.45-rel37.4/storage/myisam/mi_write.c:226
151028 4:03:54 [ERROR] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Incorrect key file for table '/tmp/#sql_5e90_20.MYI'; try to repair it
151028 4:03:54 [ERROR] Got an error from unknown thread, /mnt/workspace/percona-server-5.5-debian-binary/label_exp/ubuntu-precise-64bit/percona-server-5.5-5.5.45-rel37.4/storage/myisam/mi_write.c:226
Here are some munin graphs: CPU usage, Disk space usage (you can see some peaks on this graph - this is not normal for our server, there were no peaks prior to when this started).
This has started some time ago, before that server was okay, and server never demanded such amounts of disk space.