Randomly Killed Processes?

Does anyone know why various processes (editing a file via pico, running top to track processes, running general scripts like Movable Type) might be periodically killed on a Dreamhost server? It seems almost too regular to be accidental. I'm wondering if there's an automated thingamajig that goes around and automatically kills a process that's been running for too long -- though I really don't think taking a minute to tweak HTML in pico should be taxing anything. A rebuild in Movable Type I can see as being a bit inefficient, but yet it goes through 80 percent of the time. It's that 20 percent that fail to "Internal Server Error" that concerns me.

Even running 'top,' which I'd hoped would help me figure out what was going on, gets killed after a minute or so.

I'm just hoping this is by design or a temporary quirk, and not some malicious somethingorother elsewhere on the machine...

Any insights?

> It's that 20 percent that fail to "Internal Server Error" that concerns me.

For what it is worth, to my report of the same error recently on crack, Support replied:

> I looked at the
> server logs on the day you wrote in and they didn't provide any clear
> information as to what was causing the problem. ... it seems like a random
> downtime most likely due to a temporary load issue on the server.

Belated thanks, chrisjj. It was a temporary condition. Of course, I'm now on an "evaluation server" and scrambling to reduce my CPU usage. For all I know, I was the problem!

We have a process monitor that does automatically kill processes under certain circumstances. It won't typically kill random things like a pico process unless your user has a lot of other processes running at the same time.

- Dallas
- DreamHost Head Honcho/Founder