My Computer freezes on load every 30 mins

[qweqwe]

Hi All,
i hv a 32 MB, 133 Mhz RH 6.1 box acting as a Firewall (ipchains), Proxy (Squid and SquidGuard), Webserver (apache) and mail server (sendmail) for my home network. i hv also recompiled my kernel to support pptp. i know i am asking too much from my small box, hey but Linux rocks and everything work fine. But once in a while, my computer freezes. i mean it freezes for 3 - 4 mins. i cannt acess it thru network (telnet, ping etc), i cannt even access thru terminal, no login prompt, just blank screen.

i found out that this usually happens when there is load on my box, for e.g when i do a PPTP to my office from my laptop and at the same time, when my wife and my parents are browse the web/stream music i.e. when at least 4-5 machines are connected to internet.

after 4-5 mins it comes back normal and everything works fine again for the next 30 mins. Then this cycle repeats. sometimes i get an error on the screen that squid process killed. but other than that no error messages and no hints whats causing this. Any one can help me in identifying this or where do i check or what do i check. BTW i hv a 2GB HDD and it shows 84% full. i am ready to upgrade the mem or the HDD, but i dont want to do it blindly. i want to find out whats the bottleneck.

Appreciate ur help...

Thanks,
-qweqwe

[x]

This is rather normal when you "overload" a computer.
You don't have much RAM, on the other hand it's only a firewall so you shouldn't need much? But then there's Apache, Squid & sendmail... Memory should be it, but check a few things:
Check with 'top' - it tells you what processes are using memory, 'free' also gives memory info.
Next check your LAN connection: how fast - what cables, NIC's etc.
How do you connect to your office? A slow modem connection could easily block your machine.
Maybe you don't need to use it as a proxy, you could close a few services and see what happens.
What distro are you running, btw?