Apache Suddenly Very Sluggish

[carfac]

All of a sudden my apache has gotten REALLY slow.

I checke in top, and it is hitting swap (I thinkK!), and i do not know why. I am seeing a lot of calls to swread, lockf, sbwait and pfault, and I am not used to seeing those.

here is top:
last pid: 13852; load averages: 0.47, 0.60, 0.65 up 0+02:02:29 15:53:52
198 processes: 1 running, 192 sleeping, 5 waiting

CPU: 0.0% user, 0.0% nice, 6.3% system, 0.0% interrupt, 93.7% idle
Mem: 2591M Active, 26M Inact, 341M Wired, 6796K Cache, 316M Buf, 9300K Free
Swap: 8192M Total, 429M Used, 7763M Free, 5% Inuse, 104K In, 4720K Out

Not really changed anything, but cannot figger out whay I am slowed down so much- to a crawl!

This is at the top of the processes lis:

13850 nobody 1 76 0 2218M 2212M pfault 2 0:07 38.28% perl5.10.1
13852 nobody 1 -4 0 21756K 6460K ufs 3 0:01 7.67% perl5.10.1

what the heck is that pfault thing, and why is it gobbling up all my resources?

I am running FreeBSD.

Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks!

Dave

[incrediBILL]

Check your mail server - also see if you have any odd ports that are open and connected - You may be hacked. A high volume of spam will really slow your sites down for no obvious reason and it won't really show up on the process list because it's mostly pure I/O at the system level that would slow it down.

[carfac]

Thanks Bill! Sorry, not been around for a while- congrats on taking over this forum!

[phranque]

the netstat and sockstat utilities are probably a good place to start and if you need to dig deeper perhaps tcpdump and nmap will be helpful.

[carfac]

Not looking like it is an invader. I have been adding and subtracting various virtual servers, and I have it nailed down to one VS. Now I gotta figure out WHY...

It is a mod_perl front end, fwiw... it proxies out to the same domain at example.com:8080, so maybe something funkluy happened with that....