[users@httpd] httpd apache process gets stuck

[Malka Cymbalista <Ma...@weizmann.ac.il>]

We have been running Apache 2.2.6 with mod_perl for well over a year with MaxClients set to 200.  Today, the web server was not reacting to requests.  We killed the httpd process and started it again.  Things would be fine for about 10 minutes and then httpd would get stuck again.  We couldn't find anything wrong.  The server was accessible but periodically httpd would get stuck.  We saw that it would get stuck when the amount of httpd processes reached 200.  
After we restarted the httpd process, the amount of httpd processes running would climb.  We sometimes saw it jump from 100 to 150 very quickly (the amount of time it takes to call up the previous command and hit enter).
Does anyone have any suggestions as to what can cause this or what we can check to find the problem.  We set LogLevel to debug but nothing jumped out at us and we're not sure what we are looking for.
Thanks for any help.
 


 
 
Malka Cymbalista
Webmaster, Weizmann Institute of Science
malki.cymbalista@weizmann.ac.il 
08-934-3036