I theorise several posts arriving around the same time possibly locked a database causing processes to pile up. bringing the whole machine down after 20 minutes as heavy, locked server and database processes as children of apache swamped the memory.
Appears to be 150 instances of apache plus 86 instances of a CGI script calling mysqld.
Obviously I would need to gather as much useful information as possible why this happened and to be sure my interpretation is accurate. I have both access logs and outputs of top for the whole event.
If anyone will find the output of top and the applicable log useful showing the period when the machine went AWOL, I will make them available.
I would be pleased to hear any suggestions which will help me surely identify what was really going on.
Joe Orton wrote:
That does happen already: if any CGI script does not output anything for the period specified by the Timeout directive, it will be killed. I think it would be useful to make this separately configurable from the network I/O timeout.
joe
