httpd and memory usage

[David Banning]

On Sat, Jun 11, 2005 at 02:40:01PM -0400, Chuck Swiger wrote:
> David Banning wrote:
> >I seem to have a lot of memory being eaten by httpd (part output of top);
> >
> >62310 nobody          18   0 26792K 21516K lockf    0:04  0.00%  0.00% 
> >httpd
> [ ... ]
> >I have changed the timeout in httpd.conf from 300 to 100 which does not
> >seem to help.
> 
> It wouldn't.  Apache is normally run in a prefork mode, which means it 
> keeps lots of children (default is 5, plus the master) running all of the 
> time.
> 
> >Any ideas to have httpd timeout sooner to preserve memory?
> 
> If you want to reduce the memory usage, avoid using mod_perl or PHP.  httpd 
> ought to shrink down to ~5MB or so per process.

Here is the thing though. I can "apachectl restart" and memory is
plentiful. So it seems like httpd -can- operate on lower memory,
albeit maybe five as you say. Surely visitors have no need for the
page, whether it be php or not. Is there a way for those memory
consuming httpd jobs to die earlier?