I have meanwhile upgraded to Debian Squeeze and the situation is the same.
My server is quite old, I am entitled to change to a new one.
Just wondering what to do: go with a new server and hope the situation gets better? OR simply get rid of the 3-4 friends sites I am hosting and go with a smaller/cheaper VPS without ISPCFG as I won't need it if I only host my own sites.
The point is that switching all to fastcgi the overall situation looks a lot better but still all memory is exhausted :-( (see top above)
and here is another top, now I see it starts swapping again :-(
Code:
top - 17:31:36 up 2 days, 5:45, 1 user, load average: 0.24, 0.30, 0.32
Tasks: 149 total, 3 running, 143 sleeping, 3 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 10.5%us, 1.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 81.7%id, 5.8%wa, 0.2%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 4047116k total, 3755964k used, 291152k free, 57720k buffers
Swap: 2104496k total, 132908k used, 1971588k free, 1554072k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ SWAP COMMAND
32458 www-data 20 0 389m 11m 2040 S 1 0.3 0:00.02 377m apache2
31872 www-data 20 0 389m 12m 2224 S 0 0.3 0:00.06 377m apache2
31874 www-data 20 0 389m 12m 2236 S 0 0.3 0:00.06 377m apache2
31821 www-data 20 0 389m 12m 2236 S 0 0.3 0:00.14 377m apache2
31824 www-data 20 0 389m 12m 2244 S 0 0.3 0:00.08 377m apache2
19805 root 20 0 388m 18m 9.8m S 0 0.5 0:04.06 369m apache2
17958 web7 20 0 354m 69m 27m S 0 1.8 0:08.74 284m php-cgi
27145 web2 20 0 363m 91m 40m S 0 2.3 0:07.78 271m php-cgi
13324 web2 20 0 363m 91m 40m S 0 2.3 0:29.56 271m php-cgi
24503 web37 20 0 360m 89m 41m S 0 2.3 0:05.22 270m php-cgi
24507 web37 20 0 357m 87m 41m S 0 2.2 0:06.62 270m php-cgi
13937 web28 20 0 382m 113m 49m S 0 2.9 0:16.30 268m php-cgi
14655 web28 20 0 379m 110m 49m S 0 2.8 0:16.22 268m php-cgi
28572 web6 20 0 377m 109m 45m S 0 2.8 0:10.20 267m php-cgi
28571 web6 20 0 377m 109m 45m S 0 2.8 0:12.62 267m php-cgi
29827 web42 20 0 384m 117m 49m S 0 3.0 0:06.44 266m php-cgi
25099 web6 20 0 377m 111m 45m S 0 2.8 0:40.20 266m php-cgi