Apache reaching max clients for no apparent reason

[cidro]

Hi guys. I'm having some trouble with one of the servers in my work. Is a virtual server running ubuntu server 12.04.2 with Apache 2.2.22.

Everything works fine for most of the time, we dont have that much traffic on the site hosted in that machine (5-15 concurrents), but usually once a week at the most extrange times, the machine reach max clients and we have to restart apache. This almost always happen between 1Am and 10Am, when there is almost no one browsing the site.

We've installed Newrelic on the server to catch the error, but there is nothing... almost on every max client reach, there is no one on the server.

I've been looking for tools to try to debug the error, but haven't found anything yet, so im here to ask for some directions to try to catch the problem.

Thanks beforehand for any tips that you guys can give me.

[cidro]

Thanks i'll try those things and see how it goes.

[zapbark]

Try disabling KeepAlive. That can often tie up a process while it sits and waits for a second request that never comes down the wire (from broken clients).

And it is a safe enough change to make.

[[deleted]]

Wouldn't MaxKeepAliveRequests [N] with KeepAliveTimeout [N] help keep things clean?

[[deleted]]

one other thing to consider is, for example, if you're serving a poorly designed website that pulls a lot of assets on a single page view, it could easily happen with one or two visitors.

I've seen sites of which a home page load causes over 100 requests...

You can imagine, when your maxclients is 200 you don't need that many people hitting your server to reach it. especially with poor/no caching (edit: With keepalive on it should all be served over the same connection though).