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QWade
Asked: 2011-03-25 20:42:13 +0800 CST

Memory management in Apache+Perl

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I have a web farm that uses Apache 2.2.15 and mod_perl-2.0.4. I need to know if there is a comparable perl module to Apache::GTopLimit for mod_perl-2.x.

I have searched Google and other sites, and have not found anything yet. What I need to do is limit the amount of memory any one worker can consume. If it exceeds the threshold, then I want the worker to die.

I have already set the MaxRequestsPerChild value, but that does not prevent a worker from eating up all the memory on the box.

apache-2.2 memory-usage mod-perl

2 Answers

  1. If you've got Apache worker processes running away with all your memory in mod_perl, you've probably got bigger issues with your underlying application code. You shouldn't need to be cycling Apache workers that manually, unless your ratio of requests to workers is very low - in which case, adjusting that ratio by decreasing the number of workers might help with your issue.

    All that aside, is there anything stopping you from just apachectl graceful-ing Apache every n hours? This terminates all the existing Apache workers as soon as they become idle, spawns new ones; it's a very direct-action approach to managing the worker processes, if fixing the underlying mod_perl issue isn't an option.

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  2. For workers that are separate process, ulimit would work at stopping their memory growth.

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