Guestbook causes sever crash

I'm posting this since it may help others. After experiencing sporadic problems over weeks with a box crashing and having to be rebooted, causing lots of complaints, I have now found the cause.

I was able to do this only after hours of painful analysis of the domlogs, since there is no SuPHP installed. The symptoms were load spiralling very quickly, httpd processes showing lots of memory usage, then freeze.

I tracked it down to a user's guestbooks. The RawData.txt files were each over 450MB. There were two in fact, since the user had an addon domain. Combined, both were just under 1GB.

The cpanel guestbooks appear to have no spam protection and these were full of spam, being hit every few minutes. Since they were so big, it was exhausting all 3GB of server RAM and 2GB of swap and the box was dying.

Hope this helps. May be worth doing the occasional check of these file sizes.

Dude