Topic: Machine specific Windows Memory leak

[snitin]

We have apache 2.2.22 running on four different machines on Windows Server 2008 SP1.

Machine 1:
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2609 @2.40 GHz (2 processors)
RAM: 128 GB
PRODUCTION Machine

Machine 2:
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2609 @2.40 GHz (2 processors)
RAM: 32 GB
TEST Machine

Machine 3:
AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 6176 SE 2.29 GHz (4 processors)
RAM: 12 GB
DEVELOPMENT Machine 1

Machine 4:
AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 6176 SE 2.29 GHz (4 processors)
RAM: 12 GB
DEVELOPMENT Machine 2


On Machine 1, we observe that the size of the httpd.exe process increases to 1.2 Gb.

On Machine 2 : we run the Apache Benchmark tool to simulate the load similar to PRODUCTION. Memory increase NOT observed

On Machine 3: Run the Ab tool. Memory Increase observed.

Machine 4: Run the Ab tool. Memory Increase NOT observed.

abs -n 500000 -c 50 -A username:password https://<Domain>/application


All the three machines have the same apache configuration.
KeepAliveTimeout 60
SendBufferSize 16384
Timeout 900
ThreadsPerChild 600

It's strange the way the issue is observed on few Windows machines and few not.

Doing further round of testing, to eliminate that leak is not coming from application, I brought down the application, ran the ab tool on index.html of Apache. None of the machine show memory increase.

Then I again run the ab tool, but this time on another html which has to be authenticated against Active directory. Voila, I see the memory increase again on Machine 3 NOT on machine 4!!.


Has anyone some idea on what is going wrong.

Thanks,
Nitin

[snitin]

Doing further round of testing, to eliminate that leak is not coming from application, I brought down the application, ran the ab tool on index.html of Apache. None of the machine show memory increase.

Then I again run the ab tool, but this time on another html which has to be authenticated against Active directory. Voila, I see the memory increase again on Machine 3!!.

Also the memory seem to increase proportional to the number of requests made.

So seems that it's apache ldap authentication to be the issue but I am still not able to identify what is it and why is it machine specific?

-Nitin

[snitin]

The issue was incorrect node pointed to in the auth file.