Dawn of the Geeks

For some reason Apache has started to choak and die.  I can watch the memory usage go up and never down.  Looking around the web I’m seeing that PHP has memory leak issues and so does Apache 2.0.x on Windows.  Apparently it’s difficult to free up any memory you allocate. Sure tools exist that will tell you if your program is freeing up all your memory but why expect people to actually use them?

For Win32 there’s some voodoo to be done to “fix” the problem.

Win32DisableAcceptEx

…

ThreadsPerChild 250
MaxRequestsPerChild 100

For whatever reason Apache 2 will start throwing out errors about AcceptEx on Windows. So you have to disable it to keep Apache happy.

The second issue is the requests per child. By default it’s zero. That means accept as many as you want. That would be fine if each of those requests ended with a zero change in memory usage. But somewhere along the line memory doesn’t get freed up. So you have to tell Apache to restart the child after X amount of requests.

It appears to be working.

I’m debating whether or not to upgrade to the 2.2 line of Apache but apparently the issue shows up with that version of Apache as well. My guess is that it is a problem with PHP. But I havn’t mucked around enough to figure out if there’s something I can do in PHP to manually get the memory cleared up.