Bug#282659: Apache fails to spawn child cgi process
Package: Apache
Version: 1.3.31-7
Apache now seems to be (intermittently) unable to spawn a cgi process, which
it had no trouble doing in earlier versions.
Recently we upgraded a server that handles one pretty active web site, as
well as our nagios monitoring -- from Apache 1.3.27 to 1.3.31. Since that
time, nagios and the active HTML/PHP web site (no cgi scripts) have
continued to work correctly, but hitting the nagios web site and executing a
cgi script has intermittently resulted in an Internal Server Error (The
server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to
complete your request). The error logs for the nagios web service show
errors such as:
[Tue Nov 23 10:58:26 2004] [error] [client a.b.c.d] (11)Resource temporarily
unavailable: couldn't spawn child process: /usr/lib/cgi-bin/nagios//status.cgi
[Tue Nov 23 11:16:08 2004] [error] [client a.b.c.e] (11)Resource temporarily
unavailable: couldn't spawn child process: /usr/lib/cgi-bin/nagios//extinfo.cgi
The server shows only 271 processes, 212 of which are apache jobs (and
apache httpd.conf MaxClients is 400, even were that to affect cgis).
Only Apache and php4 were upgraded (including the auxiliary php4 packages).
Nagios/netsaint doesn't use php4 so that shouldn't have an effect
("shouldn't", of course, is a technical term that often means "does, for
reasons bug-submitting dweebs don't understand"). The nagios software was
not changed, and it doesn't look like (another famous technical term) apache
even gets far enough to start execution of the script itself.
Thanks for your help,
Ken Menken
Reply to: