jtara - 4:20 pm on Feb 9, 2008 (gmt 0)

Yes, if this is truly a dedicated machine - or even a true VPS using a hypervisor or paravirtulization, this is not making sense.

The machine appears to be nearly dead-idle, and running with a very nicely slimmed-down set of processes (25 processes?! What Linux machine runs with 25 processes? Mine has 150, but it's a desktop.)

So something "ain't right".

I'm afraid I'm unfamiliar with the details of the virtualization schemes that simply hide other user's resources - maybe somebody else can elucidate more on those. I know these were pretty popular a while back, but I think now are taking a back-seat to true virtualization.

Is this a server you own, or is a monthly lease from a hosting company? How much memory do you get on your plan? The 8GB RAM and 16GB swap does seem awfully high.

If this really is a dedicated server, I don't have any further ideas on what could be wrong, other than to suggest some kind of virus or such (that is eating memory and then hiding itself) or serious mis-configuration of the kernel. If you haven't actually launched your site yet, and/or have good backups and can afford some downtime, I would suggest requesting a full re-load of your system.