Weird server behavior after moving from PHP-driven website to pure HTML

Because of increase in our website's audience we've decided to change our site's type from PHP-driven to HTML to reduce the load on the server.

Unfortunately we got exact opposite results. A few more info before:
1. Server: Dual P-3 box woth 1gb of ram and 7200 IDE HD
2. Daily uniques: 43,000
3. Pagehits: 1,000,000+

About 85% of the site is pure HTML. 15 of it still PHP&Mysql. Average size of html file is 20-40Kb. All content gzipped.

What happened:
1. Right after re-launch I noticed a major drop in free mem - about 20-30% reduce
2. Next thing I noticed -higher average server's load: from .4-.6 to 1-2
3. We got our first system crash in a 4 hours with "Segmentation fault"
4. We got our second crash in a 10 hours because of huge server's load: 100 or even 200+ even
5. Next day was absolutely bugs-free
6. Today we got 2 crashes as well. The last thing I notice - low free mem level & high system load - 70+.


Questions:
1. How that come that we have low free mem level & high server load but quite enough free CPU (50-60% of CPUs available all the time)?
2. I noticed that there are 1-2 mysql/httpd proccesses using 10-15% of CPU appearing each 10 seconds... how can I log what the queries are???
3. What may cause such server's behaviour? May it be because of IDE drive? Maybe its time for SCSI upgrade?
4. Anything else I could check? logs?

Thank you,
:cheers:

 

 

 

 

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