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Message-ID: <00af01c1a9cf$ea8c4430$38381b09@sashimi>
From: "Bill Stoddard" <bill@wstoddard.com>
To: <dev@httpd.apache.org>
References: <Pine.BSF.4.20.0201301200280.363-100000@alive.znep.com>
Subject: Re: Parent death should force children suttee
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 15:51:34 -0500
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> On Wed, 30 Jan 2002, Bill Stoddard wrote:
>
> > Not so. If you know your site has this problem and you can't fix it for whatever
reason,
> > you can preemptively set MaxRequestsPerChild to 0 or some suitably high number to give
the
> > admin time to notice the problem when it occurs. It is wrong to whack the entire site
if
> > you can avoid it. For some websites, every minute of downtime costs real $$$ (and
> > substantial sums in some cases). Anything you can do to prevent downtime is goodness.
> > Anything you can do to give you time to solve the real problem is goodness. I
completely
> > agree that an admin should -not- rely on this behaviour as a permanent way to
> > avoid/mitigate the problem.
> >
> > Real life scenario... Suppose you run a retail web site. You do 90% of your yearly
> > business in the two weeks prior to Christmas.  For some whacky reason, the parent
process
> > in your Apache site starts dying right at the same time as your peek shopping season
> > starts.
>
> 1. I would rather have some very easy to detect failure ("the server
> falls over") that immediately alerts me something is broken.
> Checking that the server is responding on port x is a very simple
> check.  Checking that the parent process hasn't died or that the
> server is "slow" is much more complex, and the former is very
> software specific.
>
> 2. If I'm running such an important site, it is going to be behind
> a load balancer, so it is much better to have one server go away
> completely and therefore not get any requests than to have that
> one server half-working.
>

You got me :-)

Bill