Hi Ian, Some progress...but haven't solved the problem. Essentially, it has something to do with the way that keep-alive transactions are being cleaned up. The keep-alive processes are cleaning up eventually...but in a much longer time than before (I'm talking minutes). Interestingly, for those pages with NTLM auth on (which requires keep-alive), the process is in a constantly "replying (W)" status. This effectively takes one of our processes out of action, and you could imagine, it doesn't take long to hit your MaxClients threshold. If you turn keep-alive off, then everything works magnificently. This is what we have done for one of our sites (yes... A workaround...but we REALLY need PHP5 up there). Unfortunately, for our intranet we use NTLM (sadly), so we aren't able to disable keep-alive. Incidentally, we are using PHP 5.1.6 on Apache 1.3. Thanks for the heads up about 5.2.x on Apache 2....I'll pay much more attention now. Cheers, Craig -----Original Message----- From: Ian Ballantyne [mailto:ian.ballantyne@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Tuesday, 30 October 2007 10:47 PM To: Robinson Craig Subject: Re: Upgrading to PHP5 sent httpd processes through the roof Hi Craig, Only saw your post today. Did you make any progress? We have two V440's (4xSparc IIIi, 16Gb RAM) and saw similar problems updating from PHP 4 to 5 with apache 2. In fact updating past 5.1.6 into the 5.2.x series has been a disaster. The servers have today typically 120-160 child processes, and under heavy load that couunt can go up to 300, PHP4 saw 30-60 processes. The worst we ever had was over 3,800 processes!!! (the limit was specially set upwards for that day as we knew we were going to get thumped by a registration - the machines handled it :-). With 5.2.x we are also having problems with the maximum number of open files in the system too. At this point in time I would suggest that you try 5.1.6 and see how you go. We are running with the 5.2.5-rc1 and will update again tomorrow to the newest CVS because of continuing problems. My opinion of PHP 5.2.x is that it's a disaster. regards Ian On Friday 28 September 2007, you wrote: > Dear experts, > > I've been working through a process of upgrading our SUN web servers > > >from PHP4 to PHP5. An interesting thing happened when I did our > >Internet > > web server this morning. Typically, the number of HTTP processes > running during business hours is about 20 - 40. However, upon > installing PHP5 and changing the apache conf to load the new PHP5 > module, increased the number of processes to 100 - 130. Consequently > consuming more memory and swap. > > PHP pages have marginally changed, but not significantly in structure. > > Has anyone ever seen any activity like this?? It seems that it has > something to do with the new PHP5 library being loaded, as number of > processes increases pretty well straight away after restart of APACHE. > > ENV: apache 1.3 on Sparc Solaris 8. > > Relevent bits from httpd.conf: > > Timeout 300 > KeepAlive On > MaxKeepAliveRequests 100 > KeepAliveTimeout 15 > MinSpareServers 5 > MaxSpareServers 10 > StartServers 5 > MaxClients 150 > MaxRequestsPerChild 0 > > Any help gratefully accepted :-). > > Cheers, Craig > > ********************************************************************** > ** The information in this email together with any attachments is > intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and > may contain confidential and/or privileged material. > Any form of review, disclosure, modification, distribution and/or > publication of this email message is prohibited, unless as a necessary > part of Departmental business. > If you have received this message in error, you are asked to inform > the sender as quickly as possible and delete this message and any > copies of this message from your computer and/or your computer system > network. > ********************************************************************** > ** > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > The official User-To-User support forum of the Apache HTTP Server Project. > See <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/userslist.html> for more info. > To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > " from the digest: users-digest-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -- Ian Ballantyne IT Systems & Communications Medical University of Vienna Spitalgasse 23 A-1090 Wien http://www.meduniwien.ac.at/ Tel: +43 1 40160-21231 --------------------------------------------------------------------- The official User-To-User support forum of the Apache HTTP Server Project. See <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/userslist.html> for more info. To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx " from the digest: users-digest-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx