On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 1:59 PM, <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote: > Kwan Lowe wrote: >> On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 8:43 AM, Jussi Hirvi <listmember at greenspot.fi> >> wrote: >> >>> My web & name server runs out of memory from time to time, to the point >>> where it's completely unresponsive to anything. At that point reset is >>> the only alternative. (Or, as this is a virtual guest, I just say "virsh >>> destroy"). >>> >>> But why this happens - I would like to know. >> >> Sever things could be occurring. The first thing I notice is that you have >> many httpd processes running. This can be useful if you have many >> simultaneous hits. If you don't, you can tune the number of processes down > > We've got a number of websites on one of our production servers, and they > get hit moderately (it's not Amazon... but they are US gov't scientific > research sites), and I think we've got 25 threads running, total, to > server *all* of them. > <snip> >>> From "top" (situation now): >>> Mem: 1361564k total, 1264324k used, 97240k free, 8428k buffers >>> Swap: 3014648k total, 64852k used, 2949796k free, 358676k cached >>> >> That doesn't look like a lot of memory.. Possible to add another .5G or >> so? > > Ah! I missed that. Is it actually the case that your server doesn't even > have 2G of RAM? That's a *real* problem. If you're not running it on a > five year old desktop, you need to add - I'd say you shouldn't be running > with under 4GB of real memory. > > mark "got 8G on my home ssytem, and 6G on my workstation at work" Yes, giving it a few dollars worth of RAM is the real fix. If you have to squeeze by for a while without it, try setting MaxRequestsPerChild to some reasonable (low thousands?) number in httpd.conf to clear out modules that have memory leaks or a lot of internal cache sooner. A new child process will share almost all memory with the parent, slowly growing as values change. This is especially bad for mod_perl or other embedded language modules if the language does reference counting. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com