Memory leak or other memory issue on a VERY busy apache machine

[Andarian]

Hello,

 

I have a very busy machine serving about 1-2 million page views every day.

The machine is a VPS that has 20ghz of CPU and 12GB of RAM assigned to it.

 

each page view consists of a php script & a connection to mysql, the apache version is 2.2.3

 

the server gradually runs out of memory after about 10 hours of operation, (but the amount of clients per second doesn't change).

 

I have tweaked the prefork settings quite a lot to try and deal with this. the values might look high, but if I lower them then the server starts dropping incoming http requets, here are my prefork settings:

<IfModule prefork.c>

StartServers      8

MinSpareServers    10

MaxSpareServers  50

ServerLimit      4096

MaxClients      4096

MaxRequestsPerChild  6000

</IfModule>

 

I realize it might be way better to use the worker mpm, but as far as I know this will require recompiling apache and cause a downtime.

 

Thanks a lot for anyone looking into this, I will owe you a lot!

Amir

[Andarian]

i've pinpointed the problem to the apache logging.

once i turned off logging completly the problem stopped