[rt-users] Httpd memory usage

[Max Norton]

Kevin,

> Everytime I start up apache memory gets used (22mb per connection) up
> within a couple of hours and slows RT right down.  I have 512mb of RAM.

I'm using a completely different platform but noticed apache processes were 
getting very large, this was over a period of a week.
I worked around it using MaxRequestsPerChild in apache's config so processes 
would be killed off before they got too big. Combining that with 
MaxSpareServers, to keep the number of unused processes low, fixed the 
problem.
This hasn't affected perfomance, apache spawns extra processes as required 
without delay.
Without this apache started using so much memory that mysql was affected and 
performance would nose dive.

> Also allot of empty files seem to appear in my  /tmp folder.  Has anyone
> else had this problem? Even better has anyone else solved this problem?

I think these are temporary files used to stash attachments by 
RT::EmailParser, it's using File::Temp with it's automatic cleanup but it's 
not working properly. I've not investigated it beyond that, just use a cron 
job to tidy up by running this every hour:

find /tmp -user nobody -group nobody \
               -name '??????????' \
               -mmin +60 -exec rm -r {} \; 2>/dev/null

Note, you need gnu find for the "mmin" switch.

Max Norton
University of Bath Computing Services