Runaway HTTPD Processes

I am experiencing runaway HTTPD processes that hog 100% of my CPU (celeron). They don't cripple the machine, but they do peg the CPU to 100%.

They started out of the blue after about 45 days of uptime. Started happening daily for about 2 days, then about every few hours. I am not experiencing any abnormal traffic to the server.

I mostly run PHP(4.1.2/w zend optimizer) code, with lots of MySQL interaction on top of a RedHat 7.1 Ensim setup.

The processes are un-killable via kill PID. They only way to get rid of them is to stop/start apache twice. They linger after I stop httpd the first time. Then I start again, stop and they go away.

I checked out my error log for httpd. I really have no idea whats going on with the log, maybe someone can clue me in. I see those processes that ate up all my CPU (PIDs 524 and 575). That was the only place those PIDs were found in the log.

Code: 
[Fri May 31 14:43:09 2002] [error] [client 66.196.65.11] File does not exist: /var/www/html/robots.txt
[Fri May 31 16:02:49 2002] [notice] child pid 29759 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Fri May 31 16:15:18 2002] [error] [client 66.196.65.18] File does not exist: /var/www/html/robots.txt
[Fri May 31 16:43:10 2002] [notice] child pid 29279 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Fri May 31 16:50:28 2002] [error] [client 64.8.1.222] File does not exist: /var/www/html/multimedia/videos/
[Fri May 31 16:54:02 2002] [notice] child pid 462 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Fri May 31 17:10:50 2002] [error] [client 216.247.70.237] File does not exist: /var/www/html/request/failed/index_failed.htm
[Fri May 31 17:30:41 2002] [warn] child process 524 still did not exit, sending a SIGTERM
[Fri May 31 17:30:41 2002] [warn] child process 575 still did not exit, sending a SIGTERM
[Fri May 31 17:32:46 2002] [notice] bandwidth monitoring enabled (mapping file: /etc/virtualhosting/mappings/apache.domainmap)
Does anyone know of a way to trace those PIDs back to the request that spawned them? I've tried strace -p PID#, but it just hangs.

I can only think of some script getting stuck in a loop, but that shouldn't peg my CPU to 100%, they should die. Not that I write lots of infinite loops Runaway HTTPD Processes

If anyone has ever seen this before and can give me any advice, it would be greatly appreciated.

I've searched all over google and found lots of things about different apache mods causing runaway processes, but nothing that seemed to fit my scenerio.

I've attached a MRTG %CPU usage graph i case anyone is interested.

 

 

 

 

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