FN-FORUM: Apache eating a lot of memory

date posted 17th January 2008 17:43

Hi,

We put a new web server live this morning, and through the day monit has
been reporting rather large memory usage for apache:

Jan 17 15:49:57 www monit[3071]: 'apache' total mem amount of 1418980kB
matches resource limit [total mem amount>512001kB]
Jan 17 16:10:57 www monit[3071]: 'apache' total mem amount of 527700kB
matches resource limit [total mem amount>512001kB]
Jan 17 16:22:57 www monit[3071]: 'apache' total mem amount of 595260kB
matches resource limit [total mem amount>512001kB]
Jan 17 16:28:57 www monit[3071]: 'apache' total mem amount of 574272kB
matches resource limit [total mem amount>512001kB]

Usually apache sits at around 20meg, but these are rather large, it's
been reporting these sorts of numbers all day randomly.

apache modules:

www:~# apache2 -M
Loaded Modules:
core_module (static)
log_config_module (static)
logio_module (static)
mpm_prefork_module (static)
http_module (static)
so_module (static)
alias_module (shared)
auth_basic_module (shared)
authn_file_module (shared)
authz_default_module (shared)
authz_groupfile_module (shared)
authz_host_module (shared)
authz_user_module (shared)
autoindex_module (shared)
cgi_module (shared)
dir_module (shared)
env_module (shared)
mime_module (shared)
python_module (shared)
negotiation_module (shared)
php5_module (shared)
setenvif_module (shared)
status_module (shared)
unique_id_module (shared)
Syntax OK

Relevant apache config:

Timeout 120
KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
KeepAliveTimeout 5



StartServers 10
MinSpareServers 10
MaxSpareServers 15
MaxClients 150
MaxRequestsPerChild 1000



StartServers 10
MaxClients 150
MinSpareThreads 25
MaxSpareThreads 75
ThreadsPerChild 25
MaxRequestsPerChild 1000


mod-python is enabled but not doing anything at the moment, I have
turned off mod-security but it didn't seem to stop the messages.

During testing none of these messages were occuring. There's 2 gig of
ram in the machine and swap hasn't been touched, so it's recovering from
the high memory usage and monit isn't restarting apache.

The server is debian 4.0, with nothing special configured. There's only
one vhost setup. The error logs don't show anything. The access log
shows around 150,000 hits for the day so far.

Anyway enough rambling, anyone come across similar problem before?

Martin