Apache Randomly Stops

[dlewis23]

Hello,

I'm having a problem recently where Apache will just randomly stall/stop, the httpd process will just fade out over the next few seconds and it wont start again if run service httpd restart or start. I have to go into WHM and restart apache through there or wait for WHM to do it automatically which takes like 20 minutes.

I have had this problem for a little while now and I can't figure it out. I did a complete reinstall of the sever and that made no difference. There is nothing in any of the logs when this happens.

I have tried using alternative web servers such as Nginx + Apache and litespeed, both stop this problem from happening, but they cause a few other issues (Mostly with uploading large files.).

Does anyone ever seen this happen before, or know of a fix?

Thanks

[dlewis23]

Anyone have anything on this? It happened again last night.

[cPanelTristan]

Can you check for the following in /usr/local/apache/logs/error_log location?

grep -i maxclient /usr/local/apache/logs/error_log

Additionally, rather than restart the service, see if it is still running with a ps aux on the processes. If it is, then perform the following netstats to see if it might be a denial of service attack:

netstat -an | grep :80 | wc -l
netstat -an | grep :80 | grep -i syn

The first command counts the number of port 80 connections on the machine for httpd; the second command will list the number of SYN_RECV connections on port 80. A SYN_RECV state is a synflood connection normally, which is used to try to prevent Apache from being accessible (it will hang but be running) by attackers.