Httpd processes consuming a lot of memory

RT Users
1

Within the last week, the httpd processes on the RT server have started
consuming much more memory than usual. On a fresh restart, after I hit
the Home page once, my httpd processes are up to 110-130m of memory per
process. This is a lot more than usual, and is causing our server
(which has been running happily as a 512MB VM for years) to really
thrash its swap. Could this be the result of a bad ticket (poorly
behaving attachment or something?) MySQL database issue? How best to
hunt the cause? I’ve been tuning down the various httpd.conf parameters
for number of children, lifespan of children, etc… but as I said, the
problem manifests on the very first hit after a restart, so I don’t
think that’s it. Thoughts?

Fran Fabrizio
Senior Systems Analyst
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Alabama at Birmingham

205.934.0653

2

May be a false alarm, I think I traced this to a 3.2GB log file that I
was using that was logging everything at ‘warning’ and above. Of
course, that begs the question “why did I have 3.2GB worth of warnings”,
but once I disabled this logging and went back to syslog-style logging,
the system became MUCH snappier and mem usage is down.

Fran Fabrizio wrote:

Within the last week, the httpd processes on the RT server have started
consuming much more memory than usual. On a fresh restart, after I hit
the Home page once, my httpd processes are up to 110-130m of memory per
process. This is a lot more than usual, and is causing our server
(which has been running happily as a 512MB VM for years) to really
thrash its swap. Could this be the result of a bad ticket (poorly
behaving attachment or something?) MySQL database issue? How best to
hunt the cause? I’ve been tuning down the various httpd.conf parameters
for number of children, lifespan of children, etc… but as I said, the
problem manifests on the very first hit after a restart, so I don’t
think that’s it. Thoughts?

Fran Fabrizio
Senior Systems Analyst
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Alabama at Birmingham

205.934.0653