general/6557: Apache stops responding

[Boris Levitin <Bo...@WGBH.org>]

>Number:         6557
>Category:       general
>Synopsis:       Apache stops responding
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       critical
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    apache
>State:          open
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          support
>Submitter-Id:   apache
>Arrival-Date:   Wed Sep 20 18:40:00 PDT 2000
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Boris_Levitin@WGBH.org
>Release:        1.3.12
>Organization:
apache
>Environment:
Mac OS X Server 1.2 (latest release) on Power Mac G4/400

Output of uname -a:

Rhapsody research 5.6 Kernel Release 5.6: Tue Nov 23 15:07:38 PST 1999; root(rcbuilder):Objects/kernel-187.obj~2/RELEASE_PPC Copyright (c) 1988-1995,1997-1999 Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved.  Power Macintosh
>Description:
Mission-critical but lightly used server has been in use for several months. In three incidents starting Monday, Apache started going catatonic in response to a single request. In the previous two incidents it seems to have logged requests and occasionally fulfilled them, but in the third incident it did neither. All httpd processes except the original root one and the RemoteServerAdmin ones (working from a different config file) died, occasionally restarted and again died at once; in the third incident, there are "a long lost child came home" warnings for the original set of processes in the error log. During these failures, the RemoteServerAdmin invocation of httpd continues to work, as do other IP services such as ftp. 
There has been no change in configuration for a long time prior to the first incident. There is no obvious pattern as to the cause in user activity (only one or two active users on the server in each incident), the files accessed, or browsers used. I am trying to see whether increasing the number of general-purpose httpd processes fixes this, but found that /usr/local/sbin/apachectl seems not to obey the StartServers setting of httpd.conf, so I can only use MinSpareServers to do that. Please help.
>How-To-Repeat:
don't know
>Fix:
don't know
>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
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