Unbelievable : one single apache process uses more than whole server memory (5 gigabytes) !

[Denis BUCHER <dbucherml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

That's an unbelievable issue but we have single apache process that takes 5 GB of memory ! And it doesn't happens always with the same URLs, it's unpredictable and we don't understand why it is happening at all !!!

Any help would be greatly appreciated (as well as the users of the website and the owners) !

We even developed for days some software to analyze what is happening !

We do a pmap PID each second when the problems comes up, but the offending line is :

00002aad145c2000 2929376K rw---    [ anon ]

so what can we do with that, is there a way to know what it is ?

We also analyze open files with lsof -p.

I am now convinced that it only happens when the connection comes from Google Bot (????)

Do you have suggestions on how to analyze ?

Notes :

• The config is Linux+Apache+PHP+Postgresql
• Of course PHP memory_limit was the first point we checked but this is not the problem : grep memory_limit /etc/php.ini => memory_limit = 32M
• By the way we tried rlimitmem but either it doesn't work, either we don't used it correctly, as it's no use : still using more than 5 gigabytes
• That unanswered thread looks similar to our problem : http://serverfault.com/questions/161478/apache-process-consuming-all-memory-on-the-server

Thanks a lot for any help and/or suggestion !

Denis

P.S.

# httpd -V
Server version: Apache/2.2.3
Server built:   Jun  6 2012 10:00:42
Server's Module Magic Number: 20051115:3
Server loaded:  APR 1.2.7, APR-Util 1.2.7
Compiled using: APR 1.2.7, APR-Util 1.2.7
Architecture:   64-bit
Server MPM:     Prefork
  threaded:     no
    forked:     yes (variable process count)
Server compiled with....
 -D APACHE_MPM_DIR="server/mpm/prefork"
 -D APR_HAS_SENDFILE
 -D APR_HAS_MMAP
 -D APR_HAVE_IPV6 (IPv4-mapped addresses enabled)
 -D APR_USE_SYSVSEM_SERIALIZE
 -D APR_USE_PTHREAD_SERIALIZE
 -D SINGLE_LISTEN_UNSERIALIZED_ACCEPT
 -D APR_HAS_OTHER_CHILD
 -D AP_HAVE_RELIABLE_PIPED_LOGS
 -D DYNAMIC_MODULE_LIMIT=128
 -D HTTPD_ROOT="/etc/httpd"
 -D SUEXEC_BIN="/usr/sbin/suexec"
 -D DEFAULT_PIDLOG="run/httpd.pid"
 -D DEFAULT_SCOREBOARD="logs/apache_runtime_status"
 -D DEFAULT_LOCKFILE="logs/accept.lock"
 -D DEFAULT_ERRORLOG="logs/error_log"
 -D AP_TYPES_CONFIG_FILE="conf/mime.types"
 -D SERVER_CONFIG_FILE="conf/httpd.conf"