memory headache

[Anon]

My include scripts that is used to dispay ads on a site with lots of pages, is eating and eating my memory till the server crashes..

Right now I have mysql_free_result in place and unset on most variables in the script (which fetches urls from a database and selects a banner from a directory of banners).

But memory shrinks like hell.. My apache processes are upwards 8mb in size, and thats kinda big for just normal processes (It usually crashes when memory is eaten and I'm at around 200 sleeping processes)...

I wish there was some kind of method that told PHP to clean up everything after a file/script has been run.. I see no point really in keeping such large quanties of data in the memory on normal pages..

Any tips?

regards,
-Morten-

[[deleted]]

What does the script do?
Do you have any infinite loops?.

[Anon]

No, no infinite loops..
The main purpose is to show a banner. First it looks up the URL for it in a database, then selects a random banner from a directory. It also perfoms a simple count (adds referer/useragent/etc) to a db.

thats about it.

regards,
-morten-

[[deleted]]

DO you use pconnect() to connect to the database?

[Anon]

no, as I've found it to generate way too many open processes. Using only connect() and it's also closing (mysql_close()) at the end of the script. Script do however have an include file, but it's inserted with "require()" to further optimize speed..

My dream scenario would be to see that all processes (httpd) which are started and include php files, die more quickly than now, so that it'll free up the memory. Any way (perhaps in apache?) to do that? Currently, 5 hours after last reboot, there's 500mb RAM used on 200 httpd processes (4-5mb each), which is clearly way to large for a busy server.

[[deleted]]

I take it that 200 httpd's is way more than you need?
There are various parameters that determine the behaviour of apache's child processes, have a peek at the apache manual.