Managing processes and memory

[pdstein]

I've been thrown into Linux system administration because my company's website got too big to be on a shared system and we had to move to a dedicated server. Anyways...

I've noticed in recent days that our server has gotten very slow at times. I'd like to investigate why that is, but I don't know enough about Linux to do that. Using the top command I was able to see that very little memory and swap space was available. It got so bad that I rebooted the server and the server got much faster again. Obviously, though that doesn't tell me what caused the problem. Since it seems to get slower over a long time, I would guess that there are processes that get started and continue to run when they're not supposed to or lie dormant and consume memory.

I'm not looking for anyone to solve my specific problems, but I would like to know where I can ready about managing processes and memory, how to know when a process was started, how to tell if it is needed or should be killed, and if there is anything I need to change in the configuration of linux, apache, ensim, php, or mysql, which all run on the server.

Thanks in advance!
- Paul

[Dagda]

Try Linuxdoc.org (http://www.linuxdoc.org)
They have lots of HOWTOs even one called Process Monitor, Haven't read it so don't know if its what you need.