Hi there,

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003, Mike Norton wrote:

>  [snip] under a heavy load it all of a sudden consumes a large amount
>  of swap and the server load shoots through the roof [snip] Does
>  anyone have any ideas on how to resolve this issue or why it happens

No idea why it happens, you haven't given anything like enough
information, but it might be that your server is spawning many
processes because the processes that are in use are all busy.
This sort of thing has been discussed a lot on this List, but
not much recently as I recall.

There are Apache configuration variables and tools for limiting the
number of processes (particularly mod_perl processes) which you might
want to investigate.  The performance tuning section in the Guide
may have some ideas for you.

There's a possibility that Apache children are using up memory they
shouldn't.  If that's a suspicion then have a look at the setting of
MaxRequestsPerChild.  If it's 0 then I'd suggest setting it to
something in the hundreds to see if that helps.

If we are to be able to give more specific help you need to do some
investigation and let us have more information about your server, its
configuration, what it's doing, the processes that you see, etc.

73,
Ged.