Apache Stops Responding?

[altendew]

Hi we have a problem with our Apache server. Every once in a while our Apache server will stop responding for like 10 minutes.. its running fine but it will just not respond and load a blank page for 5 minutes and fail. All i do is restart apache and all is normal.

Anyone ever heard of this before or have any suggestions?

 

[altendew]

Our Server Status is filled with...
60-17 16979 0/120/120 R 2.05 92 0 0.0 0.47 0.47 ? ? ..reading..

About 100's of those..

 

[thedaver]

That's very unusual output... from which log was that taken?

D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[altendew]

<Location /statusqwerty>
SetHandler server-status
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 67.149.101.251
</Location>

Its the server status log.. but for some reason all the connection slots get filled with these reading requests and it locks everyone out.

 

[RhythmAce]

DoS? What do your access logs say? For some reason your child processes may be running amuck.

 

[altendew]

Well its not in our logs because its stuck on just reading the request. Its not like somone is sending us 1,000 at once.. it sends us one request and it gets stuck on it for a long time.

 

[RhythmAce]

I take it that this is running on a linux platform since you said you restarted apache rather than reboot or reinstall. But besides that, can you tell us what you did just before you broke it? What other processes are running and do you have any problems with any thing else?

 

[altendew]

Actually its been running fine all day today.. I dont know why but it seems to be workiing now =/. But it did it like 20 times last night.

yes we are running unix.. also I just played with exim a little but I shut exim off and the problem still occured.. but it was the only problem I was having.

 

[RhythmAce]

Well if it happens again, try to get a quick look at what is going on at that time like cpu usage, memory and which processes are running. It is strange that apache would sit and look at something that long without timing out. If it is not a spawning issue then I would suspect hardware especially memory. Some very poorly written scripts can steal memory and forget to put it back when they're finished running.

 

[altendew]

Ok I will keep you posted thank you so much for your help so far.