sudden apache problem
I'm having a problem with apache, and am literally banging my head on my desk right now; I understand that many of you are experienced webserver admins so please take a look and see if you can help
Here's my config:
FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE
Server version: Apache/1.3.29
PHP 4.3.10
MySQL 4.0.13
No control panel of any sort.
This morning when I checked my website, it was not responding. So I logged into my webserver and check processlist, 210 processes, among them 150 from apache, my 'maxclients' was set to 150 so everybody gets a 408 client timeout as shown on the access_log.
And the problem won't go away.
Now everytime I start apache, the number of processes just go up and apache would hit maxclients in less than a minute. A netstat -n reveals that all .80 connections are "established" and won't drop, and they all came from different IPs, a quick look into the accesss_log conclude that those are legit requests (I run a semi-busy website), the problem, it seems like, is that child processes just won't die.
I've had the same settings and the last major update was when PHP 4.3.10 came out and I up'd from 4.3.3 a few weeks later, that was back in Dec 2004.
I've recomplied php "-with-gd" several days ago, but it was several days ago and everything ran fine for the past few days.
Anyway, I went back to recomplie apache, this time I left out "--activate-module=src/modules/php4/libphp4.a" (that would unlink apache from php as far as I understand, right?), ./config.status, make, make install; start up apache again, same thing. Then I've decided to try and use a generic httpd.conf that came with the apache installation, didn't solve the problem neither.
If anyone has the slightest clue what's going on, please let me know, could this be a hardware problem at all? I've run on the same settings for a while and it just so happen that yesterday morning, apache has decided to go onto a strike on me.
If you need more info I'll be glad to provide. Any suggestion welcomed. Thanks in advance.
