Slowly growing memory usage

[Chris Zimmerman <fud.theturtle@xxxxxxxxx>]

I've been seeing these strange issue on several machines recently  where the Apache processes are growing in size steadily over time.

If I run a pmap on them, they all have a large amount of anon shared memory being used.

root@host [~]# pmap -d 11886 | sort -rnk2|head

mapped: 90908K    writeable/private: 69444K    shared: 592K

08125000   67012 rwx-- 0000000008125000 000:00000   [ anon ]

b747b000    7244 r-x-- 0000000000000000 000:00075 libphp5.so

b6d6e000    1336 r-x-- 0000000000000000 000:00075 libxml2.so.2.7.6

b6a0f000    1324 r-x-- 0000000000000000 000:00075 ZendOptimizer.so

b7be3000    1192 r-x-- 0000000000000000 000:00075 libc-2.3.4.so

b6f19000    1004 rwx-- 0000000000056000 000:00075 libmysqlclient.so.15.0.0

b6b70000     944 r-x-- 0000000000000000 000:00075 ioncube_loader_lin_5.2.so

b7133000     876 r-x-- 0000000000000000 000:00075 libX11.so.6.2

08048000     868 r-x-- 0000000000000000 000:00075 httpd

This anon shared memory is common across all Apache children as I am obviously running libphp5.

So my question is, is this mod_php doing it? Is there a way to stop this?

I asked about this on irc and other places and the only suggestion was to set the MaxReqPerChild lower. I set this to 50 but it doesn't seem to have done anything.  The only way it clears is if i stop apache completely.

root@host [~]# httpd -v

Server version: Apache/2.2.15 (Unix)

Server built:   Mar 19 2010 20:20:01

Cpanel::Easy::Apache v3.2.0 rev5041

root@host [~]# php -v

PHP 5.2.13 (cli) (built: Mar 19 2010 20:29:27) 

Copyright (c) 1997-2010 The PHP Group

Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2010 Zend Technologies

    with the ionCube PHP Loader v3.3.14, Copyright (c) 2002-2010, by ionCube Ltd., and

    with Zend Optimizer v3.3.9, Copyright (c) 1998-2009, by Zend Technologies

Chris