[CentOS] Memory leak - how to investigate

Tue Feb 4 15:27:11 UTC 2014
Kwan Lowe <kwan.lowe at gmail.com>

On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 7:53 AM, sjt5atra <sjt5atra at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Others have mentioned tuning httpd.conf parameters. Problem is apache
> doesn't give you the math to know what to set those without lots of
> trial-and-error. The best guide for this math is from F5:
>   http://www.f5.com/pdf/deployment-guides/f5-apache-dg.pdf
>
> Indeed, there's a bit of voodoo involved... And goats.

In the past I've used webalizer logs to get an idea of the peak number of
hits per minute. This works fine for certain types of accesses. For
monitoring memory usage, I've used top in batch mode to grab the actual
process memory usage. If the memory usage grows quickly and there are many
spare httpd processes then the sum of these numbers will climb rapidly. In
this case, tuning down the number of httpd processes and/or cycling them
sooner can help. I've found that performance is not measurably affected in
my workloads but mileage varies widely.