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

Your 'top' output shows that you have plenty of free memory, so I don't think that MaxClients is an issue (unless there is some problem with Apache allocating more than 2GB of memory?) Your error log should show errors if it is having problems creating more children.

Most likely, your Apache processes really are using a lot of resources. If you are running PHP apps, try installing eAccelerator which does a good job of optimizing and caching PHP code. Other things might include heavy MySQL queries, a slow DNS resolver, etc. Beyond that, it gets more into understanding what programs are being hit and what they are doing.