Hi there, On Mon, 13 Oct 2003, Mike Norton wrote:
> [snip] under a heavy load it all of a sudden consumes a large amount > of swap and the server load shoots through the roof [snip] Does > anyone have any ideas on how to resolve this issue or why it happens No idea why it happens, you haven't given anything like enough information, but it might be that your server is spawning many processes because the processes that are in use are all busy. This sort of thing has been discussed a lot on this List, but not much recently as I recall. There are Apache configuration variables and tools for limiting the number of processes (particularly mod_perl processes) which you might want to investigate. The performance tuning section in the Guide may have some ideas for you. There's a possibility that Apache children are using up memory they shouldn't. If that's a suspicion then have a look at the setting of MaxRequestsPerChild. If it's 0 then I'd suggest setting it to something in the hundreds to see if that helps. If we are to be able to give more specific help you need to do some investigation and let us have more information about your server, its configuration, what it's doing, the processes that you see, etc. 73, Ged.
