Why is my apache parent process growing...

Happy 2006 everyone,

I'm running Apache/2.0.54, mod_perl/2.0.1, Perl/v5.8.7 on FreeBSD 6.0.

Right after starting apache (with preloading the needed perl modules) the httpd root process is about 40MB.

After several days it has grown to over 100MB.

I'm using Apache2::SizeLimit to kill of httpd childs that get too large. I'm using this configuration:

$Apache2::SizeLimit::MAX_PROCESS_SIZE = 100000;

$Apache2::SizeLimit::MAX_UNSHARED_SIZE = 25000;

The problem here is that when the Apache parent process gets 100000 KB big, the spawned childs

also are that size, which means that a spawned child is killed immediately after it served its first request.

The only way to decrease the parent size is to stop and start apache.

My understanding is that the parent process is not supposed to serve any requests itself.

It's entire job is to manage the children. So, how come it is growing, and more importantly, how can

I control it ?

BTW: I have this problem on all our FreeBSD boxes running different applications.

Is FreeBSD / mod_perl just a bad combo ?

Len Kranendonk

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