minusonebit

After some time of not giving me any fits, one of my servers just shit itself. The box is up but not responding to requests. httpd says that it is starting correctly, but when I go into directadmin it says that it is stopped, clicking start reports a failure.

So I go to the logs section of direct admin, and it tells me that /var/log/httpd/error_log is sitting at 2048.0 MB. So I fire up SSH, browse the location, and there are hundreds of thousands of little files, all named ssl_mutex.X and all zero sized.

What are there and is it safe to delete these?

A sample is below... there were too many to let it list them all.

ssl_mutex.13277 ssl_mutex.17535 ssl_mutex.22202 ssl_mutex.2645 ssl_mutex.30440 ssl_mutex.5011 ssl_mutex.9276
ssl_mutex.13283 ssl_mutex.17536 ssl_mutex.22204 ssl_mutex.26451 ssl_mutex.30445 ssl_mutex.502 ssl_mutex.928
ssl_mutex.13288 ssl_mutex.17545 ssl_mutex.22216 ssl_mutex.26452 ssl_mutex.30449 ssl_mutex.5024 ssl_mutex.9284
ssl_mutex.13289 ssl_mutex.17560 ssl_mutex.22226 ssl_mutex.26462 ssl_mutex.30454 ssl_mutex.5026 ssl_mutex.9285
ssl_mutex.13300 ssl_mutex.17566 ssl_mutex.22229 ssl_mutex.26464 ssl_mutex.30456 ssl_mutex.503 ssl_mutex.9288
ssl_mutex.13305 ssl_mutex.17569 ssl_mutex.22235 ssl_mutex.26468 ssl_mutex.30474 ssl_mutex.5046 ssl_mutex.9291
ssl_mutex.1331 ssl_mutex.17576 ssl_mutex.22237 ssl_mutex.26476 ssl_mutex.30477 ssl_mutex.5047 ssl_mutex.9308