Httpd process using all cpu time

[Anon]

I run a php + mysql site , recently I have been noticing httpd process that are using up all the cpu time on my server(usually its around 3-10%) and seem to last forever(for hours unless I stop them). They are slowing down my site a lot and I am having to shut down apache evey time I see them. This problem has been causing me much frustration over the last few months as I often usually wake up to find my server has crashed over night due to all these strange process's.

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this?

(I am posting this again because my post seems to have been deleted from the coding section).

[smarlowe]

Sounds like a memory leak or a php bug. A quick fix on a Gnu/Linux/BSD box with the killall command (the good killall, not the evil sun version) is to put a one line script like 'killall -1 httpd' in your crontab file to run every so often.

Another trick is to set the apache server to only serve something like 100 pages before killing the child process and restarting it.

I had to do this when I started using persistant database connections to get my resources back.

[Anon]

Thanks a lot, the only problem I can see with that is people downloading from my site will get cut off. I could try and move all my files to ftp though.

[smarlowe]

Interestingly enough, even that's not a problem. with a -1 switch each child will only die/restart after finishing it's current transfer...

[Anon]

excellent, i've set it to to that every 10 minutes.