Shell Programming and Scripting

I need a shell script to kill apache and restart it, in case the number of processes keeps growing. The logic is like the below, but I don't know how to get the number and neither the syntax. Could somebody kindly help?

if no_of_processes (ps ax ¦ grep httpd) > 200
then
killall httpd
apachectl start

I'm using Fedora Core3

Code:

if [ `ps -fu $USERNAME  | awk '/processname/ { x++ } END{print x}'` > 200 ]
then
 echo "exceeded"
 #do killall and restarting
fi

[[ $(ps -ax | grep httpd| wc -l) -gt 200 ]]&& { kill -9 $(ps -ax | grep httpd | awk '{ print $1; }'); apachectl start; }

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod...tml#maxclients

Cheers
ZB

kill -9???????????????????????????

killall httpd -------------> I assumed killing all the httpd processes...

Thank you all so much for the help. With your help I think I can write my first shell script, which I hope will avoid the issue.

The real issue is when that happens, there are accordingly growing number of records like those below in the httpd log file.

[Mon Mar 05 16:08:15 2007] [warn] child process 24829 still did not exit, sending a SIGTERM
and
[Mon Mar 05 16:08:21 2007] [error] child process 24829 still did not exit, sending a SIGKILL

I have no clue why the number of processes keep growing and can't be killed automatically by the system.

I think it has something to do with mysql, because at the early stage before the server is brought down, dynamic pages using mysql slow down while static pages of plain text still respond normally.

At the moment I simply don't know what I can do to get closer to finding out what is the origin of the issue. Can anybody give me some advices or suggestions or any comments?