mehblog

For a while now my blog has been going down due to a strange problem with apache. The error log always contains the same error message,

*** glibc detected *** double free or corruption (fasttop)

Now I haven’t been able to determine what was causing this problem, so I decided to start using Mongrel instead thinking that the problem was down to fastcgi. So I set up a proxypass directive in my apache conf to proxy to mongrel. Works well but apache is still crashing.

From there I decided “what the heck” and set up a cron job to restart apache every hour. And that seemed just fine also until this morning when I noticed that the blog was down again. To cut a long and tedious story short it was the old ‘apache leaving semaphores around when it restarts’ chestnut. I have seen this problem before on a redhat 9 box running plesk. I had always assumed it was due to the version of apache that was being used on that box. Not so it would seem. Anyway, the simple fix can be found here, among others.

I’ve also changed my cron job to only restart every six hours now.

So my apache really isn’t too well.