On Wed, Oct 16, 2002 at 11:57:35AM +0200, Oliver Wulff wrote: > We are using Apache 1.3.26 on Solaris. > As I understood, an Apache child process will die after processing a number > of request (defined in MaxRequestsPerChild directive). If there isn't a lot > of traffic the processes won't die. Is that right?
That is correct. > We had already about 180 child processes running. I'm sure that there were > never 180 concurrent users. So, I was looking for the mechanism how Apache > handles the creation of child processes. Creation and destruction of children are controlled by the MinSpareServers and MaxSpareServers directives. For example, if you have MinSpareServers set to 10, and you find at one point that you have 180 children, then that means that the server encountered 175 simultaneous client connections (since it kept at least 5 servers spare at a minimum). > If my assumption above is correct, I'm wondering if there isn't a timeout > for a child process. If a child process didn't process a request since a > minute it will be killed. This will go on till only the minimum number > (MinSpareServers) of child processes are running. So, unused resources get > freed. The timeout is inherent in the MaxSpareServers directive. If you have MaxSpareServers set to 10, and the server after some amount of time (it's not instantaneous, or you'd have too much turnover of child processes), then the server will start killing off children until it comes back within range. Viele Gruesse, -aaron
