Debian Lenny + MaxRequestsPerChild

[Thomas Lindgren <thomas.lindgren@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

We just upgraded to Debian Lenny and saw some unexpected behaviour from an Apache node running a mod_perl2 app which I hope someone here can explain. 

After running the system for a short while, the server stops accepting requests. Checking the system, we can see that all workers have disappeared but the apache2 parent process remains alive. There's no relevant information in the access or error logs. After some experimentation, we have also found that if we restart the server with MaxRequestsPerChild set to zero, it seems to keep going. It thus looks like the workers stop after serving MaxRequestsPerChild, then are not restarted. 

So, any ideas about what's going on or how to troubleshoot this would be appreciated.

Here are some further details:

apache2.conf - Problematic config section (migrated from etch):

<IfModule mpm_worker_module>

    StartServers          2

    MaxClients          200

    MinSpareThreads      25

    MaxSpareThreads      75

   ThreadsPerChild      50

   MaxRequestsPerChild   10000

</IfModule>


apache2.conf - working (default) config:

<IfModule mpm_worker_module>

    StartServers          2

    MaxClients          200

    MinSpareThreads      25

    MaxSpareThreads      75

   ThreadsPerChild      25

   MaxRequestsPerChild   0

</IfModule>

$ apache2 -v
Server version: Apache/2.2.9 (Debian)
Server built:   Apr 20 2010 15:42:00

$ APACHE_RUN_USER=www-data APACHE_RUN_GROUP=www-data apache2 -t -D 
DUMP_MODULES
Loaded Modules:
 core_module (static)
 log_config_module (static)
 logio_module (static)
 mpm_worker_module (static)
 http_module (static)
 so_module (static)
 alias_module (shared)
 apreq_module (shared)
 auth_basic_module (shared)
 auth_digest_module (shared)
 authn_file_module (shared)
 authz_default_module (shared)
 authz_groupfile_module (shared)
 authz_host_module (shared)
 authz_user_module (shared)
 autoindex_module (shared)
 cgid_module (shared)
 dav_module (shared)
 dav_fs_module (shared)
 dav_lock_module (shared)
 deflate_module (shared)
 env_module (shared)
 headers_module (shared)
 mime_module (shared)
 negotiation_module (shared)
 perl_module (shared)
 proxy_module (shared)
 proxy_http_module (shared)
 setenvif_module (shared)
 ssl_module (shared)
 status_module (shared)
Syntax OK

Best regards,
Thomas
-- 
Thomas Lindgren, Chief Technology Officer, Diino AB