The problem with the fastcgi is that it doesn't run continuously. When Apache receives a request that should be executed via cgi it forks processes the request and exists from the forked process (it's like a call to an external program from the program you are running) That's why you can not get a pid for it. Even if you are checking the Apache process you should monitor the parent process because Apache runs in multiple threads (child processes).
So I suppose to free the "eaten" memory, you'll probably have to monitor and restart Apache, but this can be tricky. You can configure monit to restart Apache whenever it goes over the limit for memory usage, but you'll never know the exact time when the restart will happen. This will result in downtime and not handled request at random time moments. Because of this, I think the best thing to do is to find out in which period of the day the network traffic to the server is low and to cron a restart in these hours, i.e. 3-4AM. Hope this helps, Jovan -- To unsubscribe: http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monit-general
