Re: Can't stop apache Daemon

[Richard Lyons <richard@the-place.net>]

On Sunday 25 April 2004 07:51, Chris Bannister wrote:
> Hi mike,
>
> What kernel version are you running?
> I have just updated to 2.6.5 and noticed a similar thing, but I am in
> the middle of updating stable --> testing --> unstable using aptitude
> and at some stage I noticed Out of memory errors ... killing process
> xxx which happens to be apache processes spawning away happily.
[...]
I have sid on 2.4.21-xfs on a rather underpowered thinkpad. A few days 
ago I had a similar event when I overloaded the memory running (IIRC) 
gimp, qcad, scribus concurrently.  Everything froze while it thrashed 
around swapping.  Then I got screensful of out of memory errors, 
killing process xxx - and these were all apache spawn.  Eventually 
(miraculously?) after easily more than ten minutes, it sorted itself 
out (I did intervene by trying to kill apache and a few services not 
needed at that moment, but I don't know if that helped.  I stupidly 
managed to duplicate that immediately by doing basically the same 
thing, and the same thing happened.  Usually, I have exactly 6 apache 
processes - I assume that is set in the config.

My guess is that it is trying to kill non-priority processes to resolve 
the crisis, and that apache is simply responding by re-creating them - 
so setting up an additional drain on resources.  But that is only a 
guess.

-- 
richard