Posted on Wednesday September 9, 2009 in Work
I’m posting this here because I think it might save some people some time.
Last night and all of this morning I have been struggling with errors of the following type:
[Wed Sep 09 11:58:57 2009] [error] server reached MaxClients setting, consider raising the MaxClients setting
I have recently moved a client to a new Plesk server, and Apache would occasionally stop responding. Investigation showed that the MaxClients setting in Apache was being reached, due to a misconfiguration, and that httpd would just stop responding. Not a wonderful thing to have happen on a large site.
So, naturally, I checked out /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, found the MaxClients setting, edited, saved, and restarted Apache. No dice.
Then I discover that any increase in MaxClients should ensure that ServerLimit – so I checked, restarted, no dice. Still.
As it turns out, a Plesk server overwrites a bunch of stuff that you set in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf using a file located at /etc/httpd/conf.d/swtune.conf
This was the file that was setting my MaxClients to 10! Grr!
Edited the file, stopped and restarted Apache, so far, no more timeouts!