Like Ra's Naughty Forum

And now it does not ;-D

Unbelievable ... If it was what I think it was ...

"Block Top Spammers" plugin and huge ACL in .htaccess ... But I need to test more...

Aaaaaaaand I'm wrong again!!!

Suddenly the load jumps from 1 to 40 or something. Lots of php and httpd processes ...

No correlations left. The server dies for no reason, not it's alive for no reason.

Decreased the lifetime of the related daemons, disabled not important extensions, upgraded WordPress to the next RC2. Checked the queries - nothing strange there.

My last version is - one post with almost 100 images in it. Deleted a half. Let's see...

As soon as I deleted 3/4 ofthe pictures, the load jumped to 16. No, think harder ...

I'm not the only one, but it does not help: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/load-...-any-ideas

I think I understand what's going on (ha-ha, yes, again 😉 ). Burst load -> chain reaction. Several simultaneous requests + cron starts a java application (disabled now) + exim spawns spamassassin (disabled and forwarded) what leads to a burst memory requirement. No memory -> SWAP -> disk overload.

And this is a disadvantage of VPS. Shared servers are more suitable for burst loads (not simultaneous, of course 😉