Summary
In this chapter, we used our troubleshooting skills to identify both the issue affecting the company blog and the root cause of this issue. We were able to use the skills and techniques that we learned in earlier chapters to determine that the Apache service was down. We also identified that the root cause of this issue was the system running out of memory.
We could see by investigating the log files that the two processes using the most memory on the system were Apache and a custom application named processor
. Furthermore, by identifying these processes, we were able to make a long-term recommendation to prevent this issue from re-occurring.
On top of all this, we learned quite a bit about what happens when Linux systems run out of memory.
In the next chapter, we will put everything you have learned this far to the test by performing a root cause analysis of an unresponsive system.