Universe's Apache process and possibly kernel's multipath were twisted themselves. To resolve this, the server was rebooted. All pending updates were installed as well.
Update at 18:48: Universe was up and running at 18:46. The problem was that multipathd failed to fail one path during a service on disk array system at 2012-10-23T13:45 even though it had failed the devices behind it:
mithlond-lun-14 (3600601603c0027009a1ae2bc8a12e011) dm-2 , size=2.0T features='0' hwhandler='1 emc' wp=rw |-+- policy='round-robin 0' prio=0 status=active | |- #:#:#:# - #:# active faulty running | `- #:#:#:# - #:# active faulty running `-+- policy='round-robin 0' prio=0 status=enabled |- 1:0:4:0 sda 8:0 active ready running `- 0:0:6:0 sdc 8:32 active ready running
This caused disk IO to fail and thus Apache generated some load and one zombie process:
top - 18:26:31 up 150 days, 6:23, 10 users, load average: 93.99, 93.97, 93.64
Last updated on 5 Nov 2012 by Pekka Tonteri - Page created on 2 Nov 2012 by Pekka Tonteri