Apache 2 Weirdness

[Aaron Matteson]

I know the possible the wrong list, but i need a quick solution or
answer.

See, we have a 1U compaq server w/ 512 meg of ram running as the
production     
web server for the company's web apps.                                          
                                                                                
Was fine for a long time until the admin decided to reinstall the OS
with RH    
9.  Was running RH something.                                                   
                                                                                
Anyway, so we just finished a RH Enterprise ES (3.0?) install, apache
and       
PHP, basic stuff, all packaged cept the PHP / Apachessl, and this server        
connects to the MSSQL server.                                                   
                                                                                
So about 40 ppl access this server, and everything was cool for about a
week    
since it was installed, cept today we had load avg's of 1 - 2.5, and
httpd      
processes (the ps shows about 13 of them) had about 15 megs of RAM usage        
each, and about 30-50% process usage as well.. up to 4 active at the
same       
time with this usage.                                                           
                                                                                
Logs looked good, php error logs look fine, syslog looks fine, top shows        
mostly user processor usage, and it's not swapping to the hdd.  the             
httpd.conf file is default cept the virtual hosts, of course.                   
                                                                                
a simple restart of apache didn't work, but stopping and starting it
again      
did the trick.                                                                  
                                                                                
This doesn't look good!  Don't want to have to babysit the process.. any        
ideas or direction I can move towards?  Gonna keep googl'ing for now.           
                                                                                
thanks
-- 
Aaron Matteson - http://cryptosystem.us - JID: mindstorm at jabber.avlug.org
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The essential feature of complex behavior is the ability to perform 
transitions between different states ... Complexity is concerned with 
systems in which evolution, and hence history plays or has played an 
important role in the observed behavior.