http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=173007


in reply to Looking for Leaks in all the wrong places

If you are running Apache, you may find it nice to have a cron job that restarts it every 24 hours or so.

I've always did this because it sounded like a sensible thing to do, but it wasn't until recently I found out why :) We had a server which apache was never restarted because it sometimes forked a long running child process that would also be killed. As a "quick fix" the cronjob was turned off. Weeks later, the machine was out of memory and wierd things started happening due to it having 8 Apache child process each using 25-27 meg of memory.

Often debugging a memory leak isn't a viable option, the main use of this box was to run an app which is a big ball of mud and contains > 7,000 lines of frightening perl.

gav^