On Thu, 24 May 2012, Pete Houston wrote:
A dozen or so idle processes is perfectly normal for prefork (which you are clearly running, BTW). Only worry about this if there are a consistently high number of idle processes (say 30 or more for a lightly loaded server) in which case you can tune the value of MaxSpareServers to suit.
Thanks. As I said that problem raised its head because there were 160 of them and the system was swapping itself to death. But that was on an earlier version (2.2.0 I think it was). I will look at MaxSpareServers.
Have a read about the prefork MPM in the documentation: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/prefork.html If the number of idle processes is consistently higher than MaxSpareServers you have a bug.
OK, my MaxSpareServers is 20 and I had 21 (mind you that is counting the master, so maybe it was actually 20) yesterday all day.
HTH, Pete
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