Swap with low'ish load

Hello;

I have a Linode 1024 with CentOS and Cpanel installed. It runs Nginx in front of Apache. I have some clients on it, most of which have tiny amounts of use (few hits a day). There are a couple forums with a total of +/- 200 visitors a day, none heavily used.

The biggest spike in use will be when I make a blog post (e.g. http://www.akivathedog.com/ ) and put it on facebook. This can result in what I still consider a trivial amount of traffic, perhaps 100-200 loads in an hour, but at times some of that traffic comes fairly rapidly, but really what were talking about might be at most a page load every few seconds for a little while. Still doesn't seem like it should amount to enough to max out the ram.

What I am seeing at these times that I post to facebook and get a bit of traffic is that I start using up some swap, which makes me think I am running OOM.

Graph showing swap use jumping up:

~~[https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B-mn8OFdOruNmI2MGQ3YmItZWRmOC00OTllLTg1MTktOWQ4MWE0Y2E0NWM5&hl=enUS" target="blank">](https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B-mn8O … 5&hl=en_US">https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B-mn8OFdOruNmI2MGQ3YmItZWRmOC00OTllLTg1MTktOWQ4MWE0Y2E0NWM5&hl=en_US](

vmstat and ps aux –sort -rss just during regular running time, I didn't run these when it was swaping, but will next time I catch it.

http://p.linode.com/5916

I know that I have some overhead from cpanel and it's related software, but that's why I put it on a 1024 linode (I've been told that cpanel with low traffic sites can easily get by on 512). I know I could install WPSuper Cache or similar, but am questioning why this is necessary with the resources I have.

What can I do to investigate this further? It concerns me that I am seeing swap'ing with this low amount of traffic and based on the swap I'm seeing; I think I would see performance rapidly decline / crash if the traffic doubled or came in faster.

I had played around with using a custom Kernel http://cloudlinux.com/ and am still set to PVGRUB; it is basically a slightly modified centos kernel. I planed to switch this back to regular centos. I don't know if this could effect anything or not.

Thanks very much for your input.

Jamie