Subject: Re: Bug#872036: Acknowledgement (AH00060: seg fault or similar nasty error detected in the parent process)

From: Athanasius <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2017 12:48:07 +0000

Apparently this can be caused by something like logrotate sending many
"reload" signals to apache in quick succession:

<https://access.redhat.com/solutions/2626601>

I experienced such an apache crash this morning when the logs were
rotated.  I've now adjusted my logrotate config to only reload apache
once (despite many sections for different web site's logs, some of which
have specifically different user/group settings for the files) and will
see if that avoids another crash tomorrow.

---

From: Athanasius <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2017 13:33:24 +0000

mpm-event based apache has now survived two nightly runs of logrotate
doing '/etc/init.d/apache2 reload' since I ensured it will only do that
once per run.

  So what is it about mpm-event that causes apache2 to crash when
multiple '/etc/init.d/apache2 reload' invocations happen in very quick
succession ?  Smells like an upstream bug, yes ?
  Not that I can seem to reproduce this with:

COUNT=1 ; while [ $COUNT -lt 80 ] ; do ( /etc/init.d/apache2 reload &); COUNT=`expr $COUNT + 1` ; done

  Perhaps it's not just the rapid reloads, but combining those with
needing to create new log files ?

Although it does leave me with only processes like:

	/usr/sbin/apache2 -k graceful

running, rather than the more usual:

	/usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

And some instances of the init.d script complaining "Apache2 is not
running" on subsequent invocations.