[horde] runaway httpd processes?

[James MacLean]

Michael M Slusarz wrote:
> Quoting Andrew Morgan <morgan at orst.edu>:
>
>> On Mon, 29 Jan 2007, Dominaux, Craig C wrote:
>>
>>> We are having the same issue here but haven't been able to isolate the
>>> problem.
>>>
>>> In the interim we setup a cron job to run every 10 minutes to search 
>>> for
>>> any HTTPD processes that have been running over 10 minutes and kill the
>>> process.
>>> Most of our httpd processes kill themselves off before 2 minutes.
>
> There have been several changes made to Horde/IMP lately that has 
> tackled some possible causes of these processess.  This includes 
> better memory usage when looping through large data structures, 
> improvements to SQL queries (most notably in DataTree), and limiting 
> users from performing certain activities - like viewing text messages 
> that are extremely large - that would otherwise cripple a system 
> serving multiple simultaneous users.
>
> However, you will need to use HEAD to see these changes/fixes.
>
> michael
>
> ___________________________________
> Michael Slusarz [slusarz at horde.org]
Second Michael's remarks and patches with what we have been experiencing 
locally.

Our stracing always showed php going south when MySQL returned large 
result sets. These queries seem to work fine if you run them on a 
separate php script, but somewhere in passing them around inside of 
Horde, no matter if it is php 4.3,5.1, or 5.2, the CPU goes up and other 
users start to suffer. First sign is strace showing a slew of DB data 
returning, usually information mostly not needed :(.

We had just finished making a real strange left join to deal with real 
slow login times for new users when Chuck pointed to :

http://lists.horde.org/archives/cvs/Week-of-Mon-20070122/064958.html

in a previous post. That was much better then the crazy solution we had 
and so far it's working fine with around 5,000 users on. I'd certainly 
suggest trying them. You will need to take from the links and apply them 
to your CVS version as (at least for us) even HEAD is not up to date 
with 2 of the three patches.

JES