Safe Hammad wrote:
I've battled with exactly this on a virtual server I look after. There are numerous bug reports, fixes and workarounds out there for the taking. The only certain thing is that YMMV.
We've also had this on an Ubuntu server.
Our issue appears to have been related to the time taken to restart Apache. For us the fix was simple: in /etc/logrotate.d/apache2 change /etc/init.d/apache2 restart > /dev/null to /etc/init.d/apache2 reload > /dev/null
I'll regret saying this, but our server which was dying on about 1 in every 2 log rotates hasn't died since we made this change. I hope saying that doesn't jinx us!
You'll find a bit more info here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apache2/+bug/111709 including some comments from me where I was having then fixing this problem. See also: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=400455