We have a LAMP setup that is working prety good for half a year. All of a sudden today the apache server (mysql servers are not on this box) started to die. It seems to have started to spawn more and more processes over time. Eventually it will consume all the memory and the server would just die. We are using prefork.

In the mean time what we are doing is just added more ram and increased the MaxClients and ServerLimit parameter to 512. We're just prolonging the crash. The number still goes up slowly. Maybe in a day, it would reach that limit.

What is going on? We only have around 15-20 request per second. We have 1Gb memory and it's not half used, there's no swapping going on. Why is apache creating more and more processes? It's almost like theres a leak somewhere!

The database boxes are fine, they are not causing a delay to requests. We tested some queries everything is quick!