Hi, after booting a redhat enterprise linux 3 machine with apache 2.0.58, perl 5.8.8 and mod_perl 2.0.2, it runs well using about 300 M of 1 G physical RAM. However, the remaining RAM decreases day by day, and after 2 or 3 weeks, the machine crashes because swapping takes too much time. However, all processes together take about 250 MBytes according to ps, thus I assume that the kernel takes the rest. free tells me in fact that much swap space is used an nearly no physical RAM is left.
The strange thing is that all the memory is gone even after stopping all apache processes. The only thing which helps is to reboot the machine. This behaviour has been seen not only on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 with a 2.4 kernel, but also on SuSE Linux 10 with a 2.6.13-15-default kernel. For that reason, I do not assume that the kernel is the problem. There are no unusual things running on the machine, the main application is the apache web server with mod_perl and a PostgreSQL database. I received some hints that mod_perl might cause this problem, and searched this mailing list without results. Maybe anyone has seen a similar problem and found a solution, thanks in advance, Andreas
