Topic: apache freezing after some minutes

[redmonk]

so i have a website running on a fat dedicated server
32gigs ram, 1gbps, 8 cores.

now i have a reverse proxy setup (on nginx) which filters all ddos attacks etc and keeps the origin safe.

the website works fine but sometimes in case of attacks i think the filter passes some traffic to apache and then apache starts to respond very slow, or sometimes just freezes completely.

thing is when i restart apache, website starts to run fast for a few minutes until this starts happening again

from my understanding, this apache default config gets stomped with multiple connections which makes it slow. after restart it starts to function again until that connection limit is hit again.

i want to know how i can make use of the hardware I have because I have no problem increasing the amount of connections/sockets that remain open for apache. i want to maximise the use of the hardware.

thanks guys

[redmonk]

i think i found the issue in /var/log/ error file
server reached MaxRequestWorkers setting, consider raising the MaxRequestWorkers setting

so I increased this to 4000.

now I can see apache using 11GB RAM with the server having 3000 processes running. I can see it's going up every minute. Is it possible to control this while making sure website stays navigational?

[James Blond]

I use fail2ban to block some of those attacks. If those attacker IPs are mostly the same you should permanently block them on with iptables.