Re: Memory Hogging

Stephen R. van den Berg (srb@cuci.nl)
Tue, 25 Jul 1995 01:07:31 +0200

Tim Towers <tim@lorien.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>with the httpd process, once in a while the system load will shoot up
>from an average of 0.05 to about 10 and stay there for 5 minutes whilst
>a httpd process decides that it is not actually going to get any more
>memory and dies.

>If top is running at the same time, you can see the process sitting there
>at the top, with the SIZE column sitting at about 480, the RES column is
>about 28,000 and the SHRD column is about 360.

>This effect happens both with the self-compiled and pre-compiled binaries, but
>I figure the problem lies in the kernel since it shouldn't behave that way.

I experience this too. But I think the problem should primarily be looked
for in the http daemon. The problem at my end is that it only happens
(at most) once a week. This is too seldom to perform any real diagnostics.

Have you tried attaching an strace to the runaway httpd? What does it
say? Also, you might try recompiling httpd with debugging information, so
that you can either attach a gdb to the process or analyse the coredump
and find out were it is looping in the code.

-- 
Sincerely,                                                          srb@cuci.nl
           Stephen R. van den Berg (AKA BuGless).


Real programmers don't produce results, they return exit codes.