[users@httpd] system lockup and child pid notices

[Hugh Williams <hu...@soco.agilent.com>]

Hi;

My Apache 1.3.26 server has been having some lockup problems recently,
and while poring over the access and error logs I come across multiple
bunchings of the following message:

[Thu Jan  2 22:26:21 2003] [notice] child pid 6743 exit signal User defined signal 2 (17)
[Thu Jan  2 22:26:21 2003] [notice] child pid 6742 exit signal User defined signal 2 (17)
[Thu Jan  2 22:26:21 2003] [notice] child pid 6741 exit signal User defined signal 2 (17)

All told for the month of January I have over 6000 of these notices (the
server got ~2.5 million HTTP requests during the same period), all
identical except for the PID number.

I understand that this is a notice generated by Apache when a child
process dies.  My question is, should I expect this notice in my error
log, or is this indicative of 'poorly behaving' CGI scripts, and if it's
the latter, what can I suggest to the CGI owner to eliminate them?  I
know I have customers doing forks, and their code appears to have the
appropriate 'exit' at the end of the child subroutine.

In addition, my Apache server is apparently causing the HP-UX server to
lock up completely; in the error log is

error_log.20030107:[Tue Jan 7 16:53:54 2003] [error] server reached MaxClientssetting, consider raising the MaxClients setting

(Currently, MaxClients is at 150.)  I presume that this is due to some
runaway requesting, but cannot easily correlate a specific CGI or other
activity to these failures - I believe that whatever problem script is
causing this takes a little while to build up enough problems, and in
the meantime there are any number of other activities in the logs.

Any ideas on how to monitor for which particular process(es) are the bad
actors?

Thanks for any suggestions,

hugh

-- 
 Hugh Williams			"And the time will come when you'll see
 hugh_williams@agilent.com  	 We're all very small
 Agilent Technologies 		 And life flows on within you and without you"
 Santa Rosa 2LS-R				- Beatles
 (707)-577-4941

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