Greetings,
I couldn't find any specific information out there about this issue,
likely because it's probably not being done by many other
organizations. I'm new to this company, which is a PHP/Oracle web app
firm using an ASP-type buisness model.
To minimize impact and improve performance on dynamic, db-driven apps,
the original developers designed the system to use Apache environment
variables to store information that would otherwise have been stored in
the database (file paths, file names, etc.). To accomplish this, each
Virtual Host has a separate associated include file that contains
anywhere from 10 to X Apache environment variable declarations. At
first glance, this seems like a clever way to handle some of the dynamic
data, but I've had my reservations about this method, not knowing what
the long-term side-effects would be.
I found one serious side-effect today: it seems that when you get to a
certain number of vhosts (each with it's own set of env vars),
restarting Apache takes up to 15 minutes to complete (on FC3, Dell
PowerEdge Dual Pentium III 1Ghz with 1GB memory). During restart, one
of the two procs was spiked up to 99%, but the memory was relatively
untouched. Once Apache was finally running, the CPU spike dropped
backed to normal. This problem did not exist prior to adding a few very
large web sites to the server recently. Needless to say, a 15+ minute
restart time is unacceptable.
So, my questions are the following:
1- Does someone with a much lower level understanding of Apache know if
the envrionment variables could actually be the cause of this problem,
or should I look elsewhere? I'm not asking for a complete diagnostic
evaluation, just a note to say whether or not I'm barking up the wrong tree.
2- If the environment variable situation is likely the core of the
problem (as I believe), can someone give a more specific explanation as
to why, so I can convince the designers of this system that it's a
"less-effective" design?
Sorry for the verbose message.
Thanks to those who are smarter than I.
-Ryan
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