Error Checking
There are definitely times to quickly restart something and check why later, but sometimes, restarting services doesn’t work quite as well as you might like. For example, say that the httpd is running out of memory and crashing badly. Restarting it doesn’t do anything about the memory problem! You’ll restart it, and be back where you started.
In such situations, you definitely want to check the logs.
Log Files
The logs typically reside in /var/log and subdirectories, but some flavors of UNIX have the logs in /usr/adm. Naturally, you want to check the most specific log and move on to the most general. For example, if I were having trouble with the httpd,I would check the httpd logs. Some distributions keep these in /var/www/log ...
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