[Phpwm] Problems with live Silverstripe website (httpd spawing proceses, high CPU)

[David Goodwin]

On Wed, 2010-08-18 at 17:09 +0100, Pete Graham wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> I have a live SilverStripe site I've inherited that I'm experiencing
> major problems with. After the site has been running for a while it
> starts spawning multiple httpd processes, some taking up huge
> percentages of the CPU (these can be seen using top). The site
> progressively become more and more unresponsive returning 500 errors
> for requests.

Is the server running mod_php?

Is the server set to kill it's children after N requests, or do children
live forever? - is Apache's MaxRequestsPerChild 0 or something else?

( Perhaps it's just some sort of memory leak...? )

I'd suggest you make sure error_log is enabled; and check apache's
access logs.... perhaps it's possible to identify a request with
something going wrong?

I'd guess you could 'strace' the apache process that's misbehaving
(assuming mod_php); but this might not work; or be at too low a level.
I've never tried it myself.


David.