Apache uses excessive CPU

Question

We run a medium-size site that gets a few hundred thousand pageviews a day. Up until last weekend we ran with a load usually below 0.2 on a virtual machine. The OS is Ubuntu.

When deploying the latest version of our application, we also did an apt-get dist-upgrade before deploying. After we had deployed we noticed that the load on the CPU had spiked dramatically (sometimes reaching 10 and stopping to respond to page requests).

We tried dumping a full minute of Xdebug profiling data from PHP, but looking through it revealed only a few somewhat slow parts, but nothing to explain the huge jump.

We are now pretty sure that nothing in the new version of our website is triggering the problem, but we have no way to be sure. We have rolled back a lot of the changes, but the problem still persists.

When look at processes, we see that single Apache processes use quite a bit of CPU over a longer period of time than strictly necessary. However, when using strace on the affected process, we never see anything but

accept(3,

and it hangs for a while before receiving a new connection, so we can't actually see what is causing the problem.

The stack is PHP 5, Apache 2 (prefork), MySQL 5.1. Most things run through Memcached. We've tried APC and eAccelerator.

So, what should be our next step? Are there any profiling methods we overlooked/don't know about?

Answer 1

The answer ended up being not-Apache related. As mentioned, we were on a virtual machine. Our user sessions are pretty big (think 500kB per active user), so we had a lot of disk IO. The disk was nearly full, meaning that Ubuntu spent a lot of time moving things around (or so we think). There was no easy way to extend the disk (because it was not set up properly for VMWare). This completely killed performance, and Apache and MySQL would occasionally use 100% CPU (for a very short time), and the system would be so slow to update the CPU usage meters that it seemed to be stuck there.

We ended up setting up a new VM (which also gave us the opportunity to thoroughly document everything on the server). On the new VM we allocated plenty of disk space, and moved sessions into memory (using memcached). Our load dropped to 0.2 on off-peak use and around 1 near peak use (on a 2-CPU VM). Moving the sessions into memcached took a lot of disk IO away (we were constantly using about 2MB/s of disk IO, which is very bad).

Conclusion; sometimes you just have to start over... :)