Suddenly Running Out of RAM

So today our site suddenly won't load pages, and sits and spins. Contacted the host and they share that the VMS is runnign out of RAM. This has never happened in the four years that we have been with them. Of course they offer to sell more RAM and an upgraded plan while i ask them to help identify the processess causing the issue to no avail. They did offer this though "PHP-FMP service went down on your server because all memory allocated for your VPS was used"

It is causing a major problem to try and diagnose because, as one knows, you need RAM to move about in the background.

This noted, does anyone have any feedback on what "might" cause sudden RAM availability issues. Please note we are running an older version of ocPOrtal (I think 9 but not 100%). Regardless, as it just started all of the sudden my suspiscion is a stuck process or a DDOS - although the latter seems non probablwe due to the limited amount of users on the site.

 

Hard to tell. A DDoS is possible; they might not be targeting the ocPortal site directly but instead something else on your VPS.

It could be that the VPS has not been rebooted in a long time. Servers tend to run low on memory eventually due to memory leaks, cache, etc, and a periodic reboot may help.

It could be ocPortal's own cache system is getting populated pretty heavy and may need clearing out.

There are many different possibilities. Of course, you and I are in separate contact about this. But these are general ideas in case anyone else wondered as well.