On Sat, 21 Oct 2006, Robert Becker Cope wrote:
Tom Diehl tdiehl@rogueind.com wrote:
they are pulling the whole web site I see about 255 httpd processes.
I believe that this is the default number of connections that Apache on CentOS allows. From the sound of it, your machine has plenty of power, and you could increase this number. That may or may not help, because it also sounds like the company pulling your content is not doing so in a very polite way and is using a client that opens many, many more connections than an average browser would. I would talk to them about this, personally.
I agree they are not being polite about it and I have spoken to them. It was necessary for me to block them at the firewall to get their attention. Once they could not sync, they contacted their customer who in turn called me. Funny how that kind of thing works. :-))
The thing I am concerned about is, what if someone decides to do this because they want to bring the server down? This seems like a trivial way to execute a DOS.
So my question really is how do I prevent un-polite people from bringing the server down? httpd appears to be consuming all of the available memory when this occurs. If I increase the max https processes will that not aggrivate the situation? If I need to add more memory I can do that but I am trying to understand exactly what is going on here.
One of the things that confuses me even more is the fact that the machine does not swap nor do I get OOM killing processes. Is their something about httpd processes that makes them behave like this?
Regards,