In case you’re paying attention to the stats for the test sever, you might
have spotted a dramatic change in losts of the graphs at around 11:42
yesterday. When I saw that this morning, I obviously suspected that we’d
had a recurrance of the forum problem. I checked out the web server logs
and found nothing unusual around that time. Puzzling.
Then I noticed that the start of the problem was during the same minute
that my SSH connection was dropped last might—and my vim process was
still running, at nearly 100% CPU, and since last night had created a
30GB swap file. I killed the process and removed the giant file, after
which everything returned to normal.
So, this has no relation at all to the problem with the forum, and
there’s no reason to be alarmed by the unusual graphs.