[imp] Memory Usage

[Andrew Morgan]

On Thu, 9 Jan 2003, Fábio Gomes wrote:

> Hi all,
>
>   I'm experiencing a high memory usage for my http process in my webmail
> machine. It is a Solaris 8 system, running in a Sun v880.
>
> Related softwares:
>
> apache_1.3.27
> libmcrypt-2.5.3
> mm-1.2.1
> mod_ssl-2.8.12-1.3.27
> openssl-0.9.6h
> php-4.2.3
>
>
> top output:
>
> 11910 usermail   4  38    0  192M  157M run    23:31  1.64% httpd
> 21865 usermail   4  10    0  189M  153M cpu2   44:11  2.85% httpd
> 14099 usermail   4  58    0  182M  145M sleep  23:42  0.60% httpd
> 12249 usermail   4  53    0  182M  145M sleep  25:12  0.45% httpd
> 12241 usermail   4  58    0  182M  144M sleep  25:05  3.31% httpd
> 21427 usermail   4  58    0  160M  128M sleep  40:50  1.29% httpd
> 21423 usermail   4  51    0  149M  127M sleep  50:38  1.94% httpd
> 25002 usermail   4  58    0  145M  122M sleep  38:45  1.27% httpd
> 24057 usermail   4  58    0  145M  121M sleep  29:14  1.25% httpd
> 14452 usermail   4  52    0  143M  120M sleep  25:06  0.39% httpd
>
> Can anyone give me some directions?
>
> Thank you all,
> Fabio Gomes

It has been a little while (4 months) since I ran IMP on Solaris, but I
remember having the same problem.  Basically, the httpd processes seem to
grow when the user uploads an attachment.  I suppose it has to load the
HTTP POST in memory before it dumps it out to a temp file.

To control this, I limited the size of attachments by setting the
following in my php4.ini file:

; Maximum allowed size for uploaded files.
upload_max_filesize = 9M
memory_limit = 15M      ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (8MB)



Also, I set the following in my apache httpd.conf file:

MaxRequestsPerChild 1000


That way, apache processes die off after a while, "resetting" their memory
usage.

	Andy