NYCPHP Meetup

[Chris Snyder]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 10:28 AM, John Campbell <jcampbell1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am having an intermittent issue where Apache just craps out.  It
> seems to happen in the middle of the night for no reason.  It crapped
> out twice in December, and again last night.  I have no idea what the
> issue is.  There is nothing in the error log.  Restarting apache fixes
> the problem.
>
> Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions?
>
> Regards,
> John Campbell

Definitely check the logs to see what was being requested at the time.
Sometimes a search bot finds it's way into dynamic pages and goes
crazy, but you could also have something that is being exploited to
crash Apache and create a denial of service or worse.

If you are running an out-of-date version of Apache or PHP or anything
else that is being handled by Apache, it's probably time to upgrade.

You might also have a memory leak somewhere in your code, or a
"forever" loop that traps the server process in an unending cycle. Do
you have some way of watching/logging memory usage?

Setting MaxRequestsPerChild to a low value can be a temporary
workaround for memory-related issues, at the expense of overall
performance.


Chris Snyder
http://chxor.chxo.com/