[Phpwiki-talk] Wiki Becomes Unresponsive, the Whole Server Follows

[William L. <le...@k2...>]

Hello Everyone,
    I have a phpwiki set up at http://www.k2wrpg.org/wiki/ and we've 
been noticing some odd behaviors on that server. Every once in a while 
the wiki will become unresponsive. Other parts of the site (that also 
use php and MySQL) don't seem to be affected right away. Eventually 
everything using the web service becomes unresponsive. When running a 
netstat on the machine, there are a thousand or more connections from 
spiders sitting in a CLOSE_WAIT state. Checking the logs shows that 
Apache errors with "Server ran out of threads to serve requests."

So here is my theory. Something on the server gets a hit that cause the 
apache child thread to hang. Over time, visitors and spiders hitting 
this resource cause more threads to start and hang. Eventually the 
server runs out of threads and the whole server stops responding. Now 
this seems like it might be some sort of server configuration issue, but 
I'm not entirely sure thats the case. The reason I am bringing this up 
on this list is the wiki starts showing symptoms long before other 
things on the server. For example, the wiki becomes unresponsive, but 
Mantis  at http://www.k2wrpg.org/mantis/ (which also uses PHP and MySQL) 
remains in working order until the site as a whole stops responding. 
When it gets to this point static items that are plain HTML, or images 
are not served.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Thanks!
-William Leader

Server Basics:
Windows XP SP2
Apache 1.3.34
MySQL 4.1.18
PHP 4.4.2
phpwiki 1.3.12p2