How can I prevent tons of apache processes spawning when I start apache and proceeding to kill my machine?

Question

I have a highly trafficked application on one debian machine and apache has started acting strange.

Every time I start apache, tons of apache processes are spawned, the

Answer 1

Have you changed your configuration file recently? If yes, I trust you keep the old version for diffing?

If not, search for the "StartServers", "MaxSpareServers" and "MinSpareServers" directives. Generally you want to leave these at defaults, but it's possible that they were intentionally set high (bad idea) or accidentally set that way due to a bad config edit.

If this doesn't help, it's time to look outside Apache, for some process that's opening connections at a fast rate (could be that there's a testing process that's run amok).

First step is the access log. Second step is to run netstat, to see where the connections might be coming from. And if it's running on the same system, you can look in /proc/*/fd to find the two ends of the connection.