How do I check error messages?

[frychiko]

My 256mb RAM VPS cannot handle the stress of my wordpress blog with daily traffic of around 3000 uniques a day (is this normal?)

My site becomes inaccessible and/or incredibly slow. It seems like I've run out of memory.
I've disabled almost all plugins on my site, to see if they may be the cause. I'll give it a day and see if it crashes tomorrow.
I've read many threads here saying "check your /var/log/ messages", so I've gone into my /var/log/ directory and now what file do I check? How to check it?

Should I just upgrade to 512mb RAM, or is there something definitely awry here?

[Infopro]

Very handy tool, IMO. http://www.logview.org/content/view/14/29/

[madaboutlinux]

My 256mb RAM VPS cannot handle the stress of my wordpress blog with daily traffic of around 3000 uniques a day (is this normal?)

My site becomes inaccessible and/or incredibly slow. It seems like I've run out of memory.
I've disabled almost all plugins on my site, to see if they may be the cause. I'll give it a day and see if it crashes tomorrow.
I've read many threads here saying "check your /var/log/ messages", so I've gone into my /var/log/ directory and now what file do I check? How to check it?

Should I just upgrade to 512mb RAM, or is there something definitely awry here?

256MB of RAM is NOT AT ALL sufficient on a VPS where cPanel is installed and a website having 3000 unique visitors a day. cPanel do require a fair bit of memory for itself which will overload the server having 256MB RAM. I would recommend ATLEAST a 512MB server though I am not still convinced it will be able to handle that amount of visitor's along with cPanel. Give a try though, 512MB is always better than 256MB.

[frychiko]

Thanks for the tool Infopro.

Shekhar, thanks for your opinion. I am considering an upgrade. Just optimised some options and mysql/httpd, turned off mailman, spamassasin etc. hoping with these off I can turn on my blog plugins and have decent speed.

Otherwise I may upgrade and possibly consider switching to Directadmin or such instead of cpanel.