title: How can I prevent tons of apache processes spawning when I start apache and proceeding to kill my machine?
body: <p>I have a highly trafficked application on one debian machine and apache has started acting strange. </p>
  
  <p>Every time I start apache, tons of apache processes are spawned, the app doesn't load at all, and very quickly the whole machine freezes and must be powercycled to reboot.</p>
  
  <p>Here is what I get for top immediately after starting apache:</p>
  
  <pre>
  top -   20:14:44    up         1:16,      2 users,    load average: 0.48, 0.10, 0.03
  Tasks:  330 total,  5 running, 325 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
  Cpu(s): 12.0%us,    21.4%sy,   0.0%ni,        65.7%id,   0.2%wa,  0.1%hi,  0.7%si,  0.0%st
  Mem:    8179920k    total,     404984k used,  7774936k free,    60716k buffers
  Swap:   2097136k    total,     0k used,       2097136k free,    43424k cached
  
  
  10251 www-data  15   0  467m 8100 4016 S    6  0.1   0:00.04 apache2
  10262 www-data  15   0  467m 8092 4012 S    6  0.1   0:00.05 apache2
  10360 www-data  15   0  468m 8296 4016 S    6  0.1   0:00.05 apache2
  10428 www-data  15   0  468m 8272 3992 S    6  0.1   0:00.05 apache2
  10241 www-data  15   0  467m 8256 4012 S    4  0.1   0:00.03 apache2
  10259 www-data  15   0  467m 8092 4012 S    4  0.1   0:00.04 apache2
  10274 www-data  15   0  467m 8056 4012 S    4  0.1   0:00.03 apache2
  10291 www-data  15   0  468m 8292 4012 S    4  0.1   0:00.03 apache2
  10293 www-data  15   0  468m 8292 4012 S    4  0.1   0:00.03 apache2
  10308 www-data  15   0  468m 8296 4016 S    4  0.1   0:00.02 apache2
  10317 www-data  15   0  468m 8292 4012 S    4  0.1   0:00.02 apache2
  10320 www-data  15   0  468m 8292 4012 S    4  0.1   0:00.04 apache2
  10325 www-data  15   0  468m 8292 4012 S    4  0.1   0:00.04 apache2
  </pre>
  
  <p>And so forth.. with more apache2 processes.</p>
  
  <p>Less than a minute later, you can see below that the load has gone from 0.48 to 2.17. If I do not stop apache at this point, the load continues to rise over a few minutes or less until the machine dies.</p>
  
  <pre>
  top -    20:15:34 up 1:17,       2 users,  load average: 2.17, 0.62, 0.21
  Tasks:   1850 total,  5 running, 1845 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
  Cpu(s):  0.3%us,      2.1%sy,    0.0%ni, 96.4%id,  0.0%wa,  0.1%hi,  1.0%si,  0.0%st
  Mem:     8179920k     total,     1938524k used,  6241396k free,    60860k buffers
  Swap:    2097136k     total,     0k used,  2097136k free,    44196k cached
  </pre>
  
  <p>We have a firewall where we whitelist the addresses we know are allowed to hit our site.</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas about what the problem might be are very welcome.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>