Regarding the "load increasing quickly after restarting the daemons" ...
I do not believe just restarting the daemons clears the TCP queue. Nor does it prevent new TCP requests. If it is an attack, then the load would ramp back up immediately. That is why you have to reboot I am guessing. Do you utilize PHP? PHP-FPM? Do you use TCP or Unix Domain sockets? Are there a preponderance of http connections or PHP-FPM processes, or both? If PHP-FPM do you use "static" "dynamic" or "ondemand"? ________________________________ From: Darryl Philip Baker <darryl.ba...@northwestern.edu> Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2019 12:11:27 PM To: users@httpd.apache.org Subject: [users@httpd] Apache web server devouring resources Gentlefolk, I had an incident yesterday where the Apache web server host had a load average of over 170 and was performing very slowly. Stopping the web server did fix the issue but when I restarted the daemons the load started to increase very quickly. I ended up having to reboot the system to fix the issue. I don’t like that one bit, this is a Linux system not a Windows server. (Editorial remark: I have found that systems need reboots to fix stuff much more frequently since the adoption of systemd) I have been asked to do a root cause analysis, but I have not found anything as of yet. I am reaching out for help in this matter. The system is a RHEL7 ESX VM with the Red Hat’s main line distribution of Apache 2.4 as opposed to the RHSCL version. The configuration is quite complex and a bit sensitive so I cannot share all of that. What I’m looking for is technics to look at what happened rather than being given the answer anyway. Darryl Baker (he/him/his) Sr. System Administrator Distributed Application Platform Services Northwestern University 1800 Sherman Ave. Suite 6-600 – Box #39 Evanston, IL 60201-3715 darryl.ba...@northwestern.edu<mailto:darryl.ba...@northwestern.edu> (847) 467-6674
