Apache proccess get stucked with the status W ("Sending Reply)

Hi,

We are having a strange problem. We don´t know why, but the Apache proccess get stucked with the status W ("Sending Reply), so the process don´t die and apache "crash" because a lot of process. When this happens i just restart the Apache and the proccess stop to get the W status, and everything starts to work fine again.

This problems happens a lot of times during the day, so it happen when we are geting a lot of traffic and when we are getting low traffic (we don´t have bandwith problems), when the load or the server is normaly low and we are not getting problems with the Mysql.

We run our site with
linux: Gentoo
Apache
php + Mysql.

Can anyone help me with this?

sory for my bad english

 

You have a forked process or something is seg faulting.

9/10 this is due to programming errors such as infinite loops.

A temporary fix would be to shorten the error time outs and reduce the max time for php execution.

Without knowing your setup it is impossible for me to know other places to look.

But my guess is you have something compiled incorrectly or bad programming is causing the server to choke.

before restarting the services the next time this happens do a

ps -aux | more

Code (markup):

And post your results. I am curious to see what is running when the error occurs.