One thing we do at $work is collecting each server&#x27;s static with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collectd.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collectd.org&#x2F;</a> and often the graphs are pretty revealing. Sometimes it&#x27;s the disk activity that kills the server, sometimes it&#x27;s the memory usage, or number of processes, or a disk running full.<p>For things like databases, you can gather more specific information as well, for example number of queries and connections, failed transactions and the likes.<p>If you have a hunch what it might be, you could try to counter-act, for example limiting memory, number of processes, or use cgroups to limit IO rate (see for example<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;unix.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;48138&#x2F;how-to-throttle-per-process-i-o-to-a-max-limit" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;unix.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;48138&#x2F;how-to-throttl...</a>).<p>Also leave a ssh connection with something like htop or atop open, and look at it once it freezes up.