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meder omuraliev
Asked: 2014-01-19 18:56:01 +0800 CST

Apache becomes unconnectable after certain time?

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After maybe ~20 minutes it seems like my apache server becomes unconnectable. By unconnectable, I mean if I curl any page, it just results in nothing for 2-3 minutes and then nothing ever shows up. I'm forced to restart apache to make it usable. The actual box itself seems fine, since I'm always SSH'd in... so I think this is just an Apache thing.

After ~3-5 minutes of stopping/starting the apache server, memory usage twindles:

One second it's:

                                          CPU  MEM
21997 root      20   0  459m 208m 8504 R  45.8 20.8  10:14.56 apache2

The next:

21997 root      20   0  459m 208m 8504 S   8.8 20.8  10:37.37 apache2

So one second it's at 40% CPU, 20% mem

There are only 2-3 small websites that use PHP, so there's no way they could be consuming that amount of memory. I'm wondering why this happens?!

My config for Apache (prefork) is:

<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
    StartServers          5
    MinSpareServers       5
    MaxSpareServers      10
    MaxClients          150
    MaxRequestsPerChild   0
</IfModule>

Server version: Apache/2.2.22 (Debian)

On Debian Wheezy using libapache2-mod-php5

I know mod_php is probably not the most efficient and there might be better alternatives like php-fpm, and/or using nginx but I want to actually get at the root of the problem instead of avoiding it.

Would appreciate any tips.

The configuration for apache2 I believe is stock. Using DigitalOcean VPS, the 1GB Memory / 30 GB SSD / 2TB Transfer tier.

EDIT #1: I just read some Linode optimization article and it mentions turning KeepAlive off on low memory servers. I'm going to try this and see how it goes.

Apache - keep-alive or not keep-alive?

apache-2.2

1 Answers

  1. Have you checked your logs? access.log and error.log?

    • 1