I run a crontab job that collects the 'top' output every 5 minutes. Twice in the last 6 months httpd has spawned as many clients as it can, consuming all memory. For months it uses 14-20 clients then, suddenly, explodes to creating 50 to 100 - whatever the value of MaxClients. The logs that record accesses don't show an increase in accesses or errors - indeed they show a decrease. I see no unusual behavior in any logs. We run CentOS Linux 2.6.18-92.1.22.el5 #1 SMP Tue Dec 16 12:03:43 EST 2008 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux Server version: Apache/2.2.3 Server built: Nov 12 2008 10:41:27 Restarting stops the explosion of clients and all returns to as it was. The first time it happened I searched for causes, marked it as a quirk, but it happened again yesterday. Thanks for your attention. russell bell --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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