Memory/Server Load problems

The server had 1.5GB of RAM and was only using 600-800MB of it, so I decided to ask for a removal of 512MB of memory as it wasn't being used. I was already wondering why, because on my other server the memory was always used completely by linux/centos.

After the memory was removed and the server restarted, it immediately started to get a huge server load (20-150) and nothing worked anymore.

The weird thing was that only 100-600MB of the 1GB available was being used and up to 400-500MB of swap disk space. Below is the memory output and this with the busiest website disabled.

The only thing that works is stopping and starting apache/mysql every minute with a cron job. The memory usage is then 150MB of RAM and above that the system starts swapping and the load gets up again and apache/mysql have to be restarted again.

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Processor: Barton 3000 with 1GB of RAM on CentOS 3 and with cPanel.

Top output
top - 16:06:57 up 22:34, 1 user, load average: 15.41, 13.82, 10.69
Tasks: 567 total, 2 running, 565 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 5.6% us, 7.3% sy, 0.0% ni, 0.0% id, 86.8% wa, 0.3% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 1019536k total, 439100k used, 580436k free, 3028k buffers
Swap: 1052248k total, 225276k used, 826972k free, 22520k cached
Memory
root@host [~]# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 995 435 560 0 3 23
-/+ buffers/cache: 408 587
Swap: 1027 218 809
And all this with the busiest website disabled.

Any idea what I can do about this?

 

 

 

 

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