Shell Programming and Scripting

killall ?????????????????????????

That's the first thing that comes to your mind?

Ever considered trying to stop something in a decent way instead of using kill as first option?

Thanks sb008, do you any suggestion?
The problem is that when the number of processes grows abnormally, finally not only apache but also the whole server can be brought down.
By now I haven't found out the cause, but just thought that at lease I can save the server from being down by using kill or killall. I really have no better idea at the moment.

Have you tried setting MaxClients within your Apache configuration as I indicated above?

You should really be concentrating your efforts on trying to find the cause of the issue, rather than circumventing it with a shonky workaround.

Cheers
ZB

sb008,

I know that kill command is not the best bet to stop a process...but,I have observed in many such kind of cases that kill 'is a better choice' as stopping the process using the 'decent way' might end up in many 'zombie' processes...

Why is that?

Then possibly that should be a bug with respect to the parent which refuses to reap the exit status and process statistics of the child.

Thanks ZB, you are absolutely right.
I tried to change MaxClients, but because the number of processes grows almost infinitely, I know something must be wrong which is causing the issue.
Sadly I only know it should has something to do with mysql, but no idea how to get closer.

Or never receives the dead of child signal.

This is most likely to obtain for orocess which are started, to put it simple, with the nohup option. When the initional "httpd" daemon dies, parenthood for all child "httpd" daemons is passed over to the "init" process.

This is bug sensitive.

Therefore a kill, as shown, will more likely cause zombie processes since the order in which the "httpd" daemons are killed is random meaning the parent "httpd" is almost for sure killed before at least some of the "httpd" child processes.

Furthermore a "kill -9" might result in a not proper cleaning of the resources which are used by the process. When killing enough processes like that, at some stage the system will end up with an internal chaos which can cause all kind of unexpected/unwanted behavior like zombie processes starting to occur.

The "kill -9" is meant for when all other options fail, and surely not as first option.