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memory leak in apache

Paul Westbrook | 21 May, 2005 19:31

I think that the server problem that I mentioned before is a memory leak in apache.  When I restart apache, each of the worker threads take up a certain amount of memory.  Then I make a request to a simple php script, and then the resident memory has increased after.

The simple script that I am using is: 

<?php
 
phpinfo();
?>

Before running the script here is the memory used by apache: 

root     21667  0.0  2.4 22556 11580 ?       S    18:13   0:06 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache    4002  0.0  2.4 22596 11636 ?       S    23:14   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache    4003  0.0  2.4 22580 11600 ?       S    23:14   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache    4004  0.0  2.4 22580 11600 ?       S    23:14   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache    4005  0.0  2.4 22580 11600 ?       S    23:14   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache    4006  0.0  2.4 22580 11600 ?       S    23:14   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache    4007  0.0  2.4 22580 11600 ?       S    23:14   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache    4008  0.0  2.4 22580 11600 ?       S    23:14   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache    4009  0.0  2.4 22580 11600 ?       S    23:14   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd

Then after running the script: 

root     21667  0.0  2.4 22556 11580 ?       S    18:13   0:06 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache    4002  0.0  2.4 22708 12004 ?       S    23:14   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache    4003  0.0  2.4 22580 11600 ?       S    23:14   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache    4004  0.0  2.4 22580 11600 ?       S    23:14   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache    4005  0.0  2.4 22580 11600 ?       S    23:14   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache    4006  0.0  2.4 22580 11600 ?       S    23:14   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache    4007  0.0  2.4 22580 11600 ?       S    23:14   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache    4008  0.0  2.4 22580 11600 ?       S    23:14   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache    4009  0.0  2.4 22580 11600 ?       S    23:14   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd

It appears that the worker thread that handled the request is now using about 100KB more memory.  This is not a real big deal for a small file like this, but for this blog, the worker thread grows about 12MB.

I assume that once a thread is done with a request, all of the memory used for that request should be freed.

I have temporarily fixed this in two ways:

  1. Reduced the maximum number of requests that a single thread has to handle to 50
  2. I now call "/etc/init.d/httpd graceful"to restart apache once an hour

Next I want to look through all of the modules that are being included to see if I can disable some to free memory

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