How to diagnose why a web server with idle applications becomes unresponsive? - performance

Question

I have a Digital Ocean droplet (512MB RAM, 20GB SSD Disk, Ubuntu 13.10 x64) on which
a MongoDB instance and
a Tomcat 7 server
run.
On the Tomcat server, following applications are installed
Apache CXF-based application, which takes processes web service requests, interacts with the database and executes scheduled jobs,
Vaadin application,
JSF (Primefaces) application and
Psi Probe.
When I
restart Tomcat,
use the Vaadin and/or JSF application,
then for several weeks do nothing on that machine (it basically is idle during that time),
then try to open the JSF and/or Vaadin application,
I find the site unresponsive (nothing is displayed after I enter the URL in the browser).
When I restart Tomcat (sudo service tomcat7 restart), everything works again. I don't see any obvious problems in the Tomcat logs.
How can I find out,
whether the problem is on the Tomcat side (one of the applications consumes too many resources even if idle) or on the OS side (nothing happens on the machine and therefore the OS puts itself into a "hibernating" mode) and
if the problem is with Tomcat, exactly which of the application is causing it?

Answer 1

Please start from top to bottom.
then try to open the JSF and/or Vaadin application,
I find the site unresponsive (nothing is displayed after I enter the
URL in the browser).
Check if the service is still running before restarting sudo service tomcat7 status and/or ps -ef | grep tomcat
Check with netstat -patune | grep <portnumber, e.g. 443> if the server is listening on the configured ports
Check your httpd/Apache/Tomcat access logs if the request reaches the server and if yes, check if there are errors or timeouts related to the requests
Check if the DB connection is still possible
To force some error logs, try to change your maxIdle, maxActive and maxWait attributes of your Tomcat's Connection Pool configuration. maxWait default is -1, connections created sometimes during these weeks will wait forever.

Answer 2

#Patrick provided some excellent basic tests.
I notice that you only have 512 MB of RAM. With some fairly beefy software such as tomcat, plus MongoDB on top of that, your machine may simply be overloaded.
Based on that, I would propose a couple additional things to check:
sudo free
Should tell you how much memory is being used, and how much swap space you use.
sudo top
Will tell you which process is using the most memory. You may want to sort the output of top by memory (default is usually by CPU utilization).
Most importantly, check the log files in /var/log (in particular /var/log/messages). You may find indications that the kernel killed one of your processes (probably tomcat).