Re: killing of greater than MaxSpareServers

[Perrin Harkins]

On Wed, 17 Jan 2001, ___cliff rayman___ wrote:
> i and others have written on the list before, that pushing apache
> children into swap causes a rapid downward spiral in performance. I
> don't think that MaxClients is the right way to limit the # of
> children.  i think MaxSpareCoreMemory would make more sense.  You
> could set this to 1K if your server was designated for Apache only, or
> set it to a higher value if it were a multipurpose machine.

I've thought about that too.  The trick is, Apache would need to know
things about your application to do that right.  It would need to know how
big your processes were likely to be and how big they could get before
they die.  Otherwise, it has no way of knowing whether or not there's
enough room for another process.

A combination of Apache::SizeLimit and a dynamically changing MaxClients
could possibly accomplish this, but you wouldn't want to run it too close
to the edge since you don't want to have to axe a process that's in the
middle of doing something just because it got a little too big (i.e. no
hard limits on per-process memory usage).

You can't change MaxClients while the server is running, can you?

- Perrin