[rt-users] Mod_FastCgi and RT

[Rich West]

I have a peculiar situation which crept up only a few weeks ago and I 
have been able to narrow it down to RT + mod_FastCgi.

About 3 weeks ago, I updated to the latest FC2 kernel and a number of 
other nondescript packages.  Around the same time, I started 
experiencing, on a nightly basis around 4:30am, where the web server 
would be unresponsive.  The server was running, but not handling any 
requests.  Restarting the web server would bring it back on-line until 
the next evening.

I'll omit all of the debugging here as it would not be relevant, but 
suffice it to say that at 4:20am, logrotate would come along and kill 
-USR1 httpd after rotating the logs, which was the same time that things 
tanked out.  Sounds like an Apache problem, right?

Well, I dug further, and recompiled the custom modules that we utilize 
(mod_auth_ldap2 and mod_fastcgi) to use the newer version of the web 
server.  We're pretty stuck on mod_fastcgi 2.4.0 because 2.4.2 does not 
support running FastCgiServer processes within VirtualHosts (who thought 
disabling that was a good idea?!).

Long story short, it turns out that, upon startup, if a FastCGI server 
is configured to run, *most* of the httpd processes are running as root 
(bad) and the remaining 2 or 3 are running as the apache user (not 
including the parent process, of course).  In the situations where the 
server was unresponsive from 4:20am, all of the processes were running 
as root.  So, if all of the processes were running as root, the web 
server is completely unresponsive.

So, if I disable the FastCgiServer processes (just commenting them out) 
and start up the server, everything comes up just fine..  If I have the 
FastCgiServer processes enabled, then 2 or 3 of forked web server 
processes run as apache, the rest run as root..

Is this just us?! Could this be kernel related?  I've personally been 
using RT with mod_fastcgi for ages.. it is just plain odd that it has 
tanked out on us like this.

I'm thinking of moving back from mod_fastcgi to mod_perl... 

-Rich