Apache memory leak

[Andreas Schwarz <usenet@andreas-s.net>]

Hello,

I'm using Apache from Debian Woody on my server. Now I noticed that
Apache is eating up more and more memory, so that I have to restart it
every few days. The following graph of the swap usage illustrates the
problem:
https://andreas-s.net/mrtg/localhost.swap-week.png
The big drop around saturday evening was when I restarted Apache.

It seems this problem exists since I have set up a cronjob to run
logrotate every hour to update my statistics. The rotation itself is
only done once per week, but every time the logrotate script is run, it
executes /etc/init.d/apache reload. So I tried to run "/etc/init.d/apache
reload manually", and I could see the apache memory usage increase by
about 500kB (fits quite well to the swapping graph):

Before:
 9765 www-data  10   0 24836  21M 19968 R     4.8 21.8   0:00 apache

After /etc/init.d/apache reload:
10031 www-data   4   0 26888  23M 23508 S     0.0 23.8   0:00 apache

Any ideas on how I could track down this problem?

Andreas