Alex Greg wrote: > Hi, > > > We've been having some issues with our mod_perl web servers recently. > Basically what happens is the server becomes very very slow, to the > point of being almost totally unresponsive. At the time this happens, we > see this in the error log: > > > [Thu Sep 30 09:44:43 2004] [error] (12)Cannot allocate memory: fork: > Unable to fork new process
there is lots of documentation around about how to tune your httpd processes so that they don't kill your box. see, for example http://perl.apache.org/docs/1.0/guide/performance.html as well as chapters 11 and 12 in practical mod_perl chapter 9 in the mod_perl developer's cookbook > > This is because a shell call to date ($date = `date`;) is failing - this > is most likely what's causing the failure to fork we see above. if you want to avoid that shell call try POSIX::strftime() instead. but I suspect that the httpd failure isn't caused by calling out to shell, but rather that the shell call failure is a symptom of the real problem. HTH --Geoff -- Report problems: http://perl.apache.org/bugs/ Mail list info: http://perl.apache.org/maillist/modperl.html List etiquette: http://perl.apache.org/maillist/email-etiquette.html
