Ubuntu Keeps Needing Restart

Heya @topherknollaxolotl,

Check your CPU and RAM usage, it seems like something out of the ordinary happened and most probably Apache either crashed or your Droplet had to kill some processes not to crash and chose Apache to kill.

If that is the case, you might need to upgrade or optimize your Droplet and Application.

Having said that, take a look at adding a SWAP. For a short-term solution, it works well.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorial-collections/how-to-add-swap-space

Swap is a portion of hard drive storage that has been set aside for the operating system to temporarily store data that it can no longer hold in RAM. This lets you increase the amount of information that your server can keep in its working memory, with some caveats. The swap space on the hard drive will be used mainly when there is no longer sufficient space in RAM to hold in-use application data.

The information written to disk will be significantly slower than information kept in RAM, but the operating system will prefer to keep running application data in memory and use swap for the older data. Overall, having swap space as a fallback for when your system’s RAM is depleted can be a good safety net against out-of-memory exceptions on systems with non-SSD storage available.

Hey Topher,

The could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80 error is making me think that you might either have multiple Apache instances running or possibly another web server like Nginx also installed.

First, check if there are multiple Apache processes running at the same time. Run the following command to list all Apache processes:

ps aux | grep apache2

If you see more than one Apache master process (with different PIDs), that’s a problem. You can try killing all Apache processes and restarting Apache cleanly:

sudo killall apache2
sudo systemctl start apache2

Also check if Nginx is running on that port by any chance:

netstat -plant

Basically, you can monitor what’s using port 80 to catch any conflicts:

sudo lsof -i :80

This will show you any processes bound to port 80. If you see multiple Apache processes or another service using the port, that’s likely causing the problem.

Since the log mentions “graceful restart requested,” something might be triggering it. Check for cron jobs or scheduled tasks that could be causing this:

sudo crontab -l

If there’s a cron job or something similar restarting Apache, either remove it or modify it to prevent these frequent restarts.

If there are no cron jobs that might be causing this, it’s possible the server is running out of resources (CPU, RAM), which could trigger unclean shutdowns. Check system logs for any signs of resource exhaustion:

sudo dmesg | grep -i oom

If you see any “Out of Memory” (OOM) errors, you may need to optimize your app’s resource usage or resize your Droplet to handle the load.

Or alternatively, check your DigitalOcean monitoring graphs:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/monitoring/

You might need to just upgrade your server and add more RAM and CPU:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/how-to/resize/

Let me know if you need more help or if this resolves it! 🚀

- Bobby

Heya,

The first error is likely related to an unclean shutdown whichs leaves orphaned Apache processes, causing the error - (98)Address already in use: AH00072: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80

I’ll recommend to examine the logs if the droplet us running out of memory. Usually there will be references in /var/log/messages indicating that a process was killed - oom or out of memory

What I would usually do if I’m getting that error on a Droplet with 1GB of RAM, is to add swap space, that way you would have some extra buffer in case that your RAM is fully exhausted. This step usually benefits a lot a smaller droplet.

You can follow the steps on how to do that here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-swap-space-on-ubuntu-22-04

Hope that this helps!