PHP5 install causes great increase in HTTPD processes

[BrizRobbo]

Hi Folks,

 

We've been running PHP4 for many years, and are just going through a process of upgrading to PHP5.

 

However, we've had to rollback in our PROD environment because (it seems) that the number of apache processes dramatically increases over a short time.

 

For instance, if we've been running with about 30 HTTPD processes under PHP4, and with the same load, we are cracking 150 HTTPD processes under PHP5.

 

I have heard that PHP5 handles keep-alive connections differently than PHP4, and my first (largely un-informed) guess is that connections are being kept open for longer, which as you would expect, could have an incremental effect on the number of processes.

 

Does anyone know of any php.ini configuration directives that I should be looking at in order to tune things like this? Any pointers would be appreciated.

 

Environment is PHP 5.1.6 with APACHE 1.3.36 on Solaris 8.

 

Cheers, Craig

[chillininvt]

Could you elaborate on this I am confused as to what you are running and what process are supposedly running. Do you have traffic issues? Please explain more?

[BrizRobbo]

Hi,

 

I have been digging into this more for the last two weeks and it gets very interesting. Some parts of our site use NTLM for authentication to Active Directory. What is actually happening is that, when someone requests a page that has NTLM authentication requirements, APACHE (1.3.36) keeps the connection open in a "Sending reply" status for a VERY long time (indefinite). As you can imagine, your MaxClients processes quickly gets consumed if connections do not get released.

 

The interesting thing is that this only occurs with PHP5, not PHP4. We compiled PHP5 for Solaris, using pretty-well default options....so I am wondering what may be in the compilation options/config/anywhere that might control how PHP5 deals with connections?

 

Cheers.