Core Dump files slowing down website

For last few days, or rather weeks, my blog was really slow. Infact the site was throwing resource limit error at times. I contacted my webhosting provider, but they just replied they cannot find anything. So I decided to do some investigation on my own.

First step was to check memory and CPU usage, which turned out to be very high, almost 100%. The fishy thing I figured out was disk space usage, which was way above data I have, so I checked the file system. I figured out hundreds of core.XXXXX files. A little googling showed that these were dump files created by Apache for memory dump, in case some error / crash occured. Deleting these extra files did solve the issue.

More info on the topic

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/hacked-with-strange-core-files

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/arrrg-so-many-core-files

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_dump