Rob,
This won't be much help, but we've had this happen under severe load too
(Apache 2.0.50, RHEL 3, 2.4.21-40). I haven't managed to find an
explanation, but my current assumption is that either Apache or the OS
is running out of some critical resource (file descriptors? socket
limits? who knows.....)
I would have expected Apache to log something if it failed to start due
to something like that though, but it doesn't. It reports everything
perfectly normally but is simply unable to serve any requests. None of
the system logs show anything out of the ordinary either and other
services continue to work fine. Indeed, we have a second Apache
installation on the same box, used for a few test sites and under very
little load, which continued to serve requests - this implies the server
and OS were actually fine....
Never saw anything like this while running v1.3 for 3 years, but the
server was never under as much load as it is now so that may be why. It
would just be useful if Apache would actually log something when it
fails to start properly :-)
Matt
on 24/07/2006 18:46 Robert Fox said the following:
Rob-
Thanks for the response.
This is definitely not a configuration issue. The error logs don't
seem to indicate why only one process starts, but the children fail to
start. I get a normal startup message in the logs. The only thing that
clears this is re-booting the host.
Are there other places where I could look?
Rob
Rob Wilkerson wrote:
I'd check your config first. I forget the syntax for Redhat, but for
my Knoppix system it's "/usr/sbin/apache2 -t". To check your system,
locate the httpd executable and display it's help:
"/path/to/httpd -h"
Then, assuming everything checks out, check /var/log/httpd. Hopefully
this will provide enough info to move forward.
On 7/24/06, Robert Fox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hello again-
I haven't received any responses on this, so I thought maybe I could
simplify my question. If Apache fails to restart,
where should I look to find out why? The log files? System logs?
Other Apache files (which ones)? Should I run a
diagnostic while Apache is frozen? What should I look for?
Thanks very much for any replies. I'm starting somewhat from ground
zero here.
Rob Fox
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Apache overwhelmed, restart fails
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 11:42:07 -0400
From: Robert Fox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: users@httpd.apache.org
Hello-
We've been using Apache 2 here at Notre Dame libraries for several
years now, and for the most part, the performance has
been very reliable. However, there have been times during very peak
usage periods when the Apache servers will freeze
and essentially stop responding to further requests. We have several
CGI applications running under the server that can
be taxing, and sometimes Apache seems to get overwhelmed, and the
maximum number of available server spawns are reached.
When this happens, I've tried to restart Apache by first shutting it
down and then starting the server again. However,
what usually happens is that the first server process will start,
and child processes do not spawn. This renders Apache
useless again, and I'm usually forced to completely re-boot the
server machine on which Apache is running in order to
clear RAM and reset the network connections. Then, Apache comes up
and everything is fine until the next incident. Here
are some specs on our installation:
Server version: Apache/2.0.54
OS Version: Red Hat EL 3.0 (kernel 2.4.21-4.ELsmp)
Modules loaded: PHP 5, authentication modules, etc.
The CGI applications are mainly Perl based.
I've looked in the Apache logs (both main and error) and there is no
indication that the server is failing around the
time that Apache freezes up. It seems odd that I can't stop the
Apache servers and restart them, which solves 90% of
these sorts of issues with Apache. Except for administrative
purposes, I rarely need to restart Apache, so this isn't a
major issue. But, I would like to know where to look to try and
determine what is happening when I'm unable to restart
Apache. It's odd that the first process would start but the child
processes won't. Any ideas?
Thank you for your help,
Rob Fox
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