Completely unintuitive Apache/PHP memory-freeing behavior
- by David
Okay, this one's weird. I have a Turnkey Linux server with a gig of dedicated RAM. It's running WP3.2 with a boatload of plug-ins. It's a new site, so it has very limited traffic (other than search engines, maybe 20 hits a week).
Now, for a few weeks, every few days, it would max out on main RAM, start eating up virtual RAM, and then crash. It's had this behavior for a while and I've been trying to figure out which element was causing the crash.
Nine days ago, I pointed my external server monitor to this server. I wrote a 5-line HTML file (not PHP and not WP) that the server monitor accesses every minute, to see if the server is up.
So, now, nine days later, the server has been rock solid, up all the time, no memory leak at all. I changed NOTHING on the server itself to see this behavior change.
Have you EVER seen anything like this? All the server monitor is doing is retrieving a single, super-simple HTML file and all the memory leak problems have gone away.
Weird, eh?
