Apache processes not dying

[Chris Allen <li...@cjx.com>]

I am running a site with:

Apache 1.3.9
mod perl 1.21
HTML::Embperl
 

The site is relatively busy - up to 30000 hits a day, and has been
running fine for over a year. However in the last two weeks I
have found that I am ending up with a large number of httpd
processes that don't die.

Looking with apache status shows nothing out of the ordinary - 
the processes are usually in the W (sending reply) state - 
however ps shows them as

[httpd]

rather than the more normal 

/usr/local/apache/bin/httpd

which I thought indicated a process that had stopped responding.

Attaching with strace shows the processes are *always* sitting at:

read(46,


Problem is, that Apache seems to ignore these processes and start new ones
without killing them - so I end up with *hundreds* of http processes with
the machine swapping like crazy.

The rogue processes also haven't reached their MaxRequestsPerChild limit of
100 yet either - they are usually at about 20 or 30 or so...


Any ideas as to what I could try to find out what is happening would
be much appreciated - at the moment I am having to kill them all off
with a script at regular intervals!


Chris Allen
chris@cjx.com

Re: Apache processes not dying

[Chris Allen <ch...@cjx.com>]

On Tue, Mar 06, 2001 at 10:43:03AM +0800, Stas Bekman wrote:
> > Problem is, that Apache seems to ignore these processes and start new ones
> > without killing them - so I end up with *hundreds* of http processes with
> > the machine swapping like crazy.
> 
> http://perl.apache.org/guide/debug.html#Hanging_Processes_Detection_and
> See also Apache::Watchdog::RunAway
> 

Many thanks. Consider my wrist slapped for not having found this.

Re: Apache processes not dying

[Stas Bekman <st...@stason.org>]

> The site is relatively busy - up to 30000 hits a day, and has been
> running fine for over a year. However in the last two weeks I
> have found that I am ending up with a large number of httpd
> processes that don't die.
>

[snip]

> Problem is, that Apache seems to ignore these processes and start new ones
> without killing them - so I end up with *hundreds* of http processes with
> the machine swapping like crazy.

http://perl.apache.org/guide/debug.html#Hanging_Processes_Detection_and
See also Apache::Watchdog::RunAway

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