apache memory leak?

[cody]

help! apache ate all my ram up!

B&w G3/512/10.1.2

i run a small personal weblog off my system at home. a while back i made a symlink to my music directory so my friends could download mp3's from me.

well, stupid me i forgot to robots.txt the directory, and well, long story short, google indexed it, a couple of mp3 link sites list me and now i'm serving up hundreds to thousands of mp3's a day...

which, i guess wouldn't bother me so much, my dsl has an upload cap so they're not leaving me without bandwidth, all of userland and the web root etc are on speedy scsi drives, so it doesn't effect my system too much at all.

except that from a fresh boot it takes less than 12 hours for my 380 free megs of ram to completely dissapear. using top i can't find them attatched to any process.

for now i've simply removed the symlink alltogether. but eventually i'd like to put it back up for the people i know. any ideas about the memory problems?

 

[theed]

essentially apache is incapable of having a memory link because it does everything (almost) as a finite life span thread. All because of the MaxRequestsPerChild limitation. the Apache Group ran their stuff on OSes which were fundamentally leaky, and to keep apache up on OSes which leaked, they came up with this. I think there may be file caching going on in the OS, but this is normal unix behaviour. Effectively... yeah, what he said.