On Sep 6, 2006, at 1:49 PM, Vincent van Scherpenseel wrote:
> 11518 www       -4    0    24M 4556K semwait    0:08  0.00%  0.00%  
> httpd
> 27634 www       -4    0  3104K 2972K semwait    0:00  0.00%  0.00%  
> httpd
> 27635 www       -4    0  3100K 2948K semwait    0:00  0.00%  0.00%  
> httpd
> 27817 www       -4    0  2936K 3592K semwait    0:00  0.00%  0.00%  
> httpd
>   355 root       2    0  2704K  408K select     0:12  0.00%  0.00%  
> httpd
>
> Resident has increased quite a lot since the last snapshot (about  
> 35 minutes ago). There are indeed some cronjobs (mostly a perl  
> script fetching weather information for me) but I don't think  
> they're causing this, since they have nothing to do with httpd.

An initial size of httpd at 3MB seems entirely reasonable; if they  
continue to grow over time, that suggests a memory leak within one of  
the modules you are using, or maybe within NetBSD's libraries.  See  
whether setting "MaxRequestsPerChild 100" in your httpd.conf helps  
control the growth of httpd process size.

> The problem of processes getting killed happens just every now and  
> then when the system is out of swap. Just when I'm doing nothing on  
> the system (not even logged in!) but also when I'm compiling etc.
>
> So is there no chance this is hardware related? Because somehow I'm  
> really looking into that corner.

No, there is no chance this is hardware related.  You're running  
Apache, MySQL, random Perl scripts, and apparently trying to compile  
or do other stuff, on a machine that simply doesn't have enough RAM  
or swapspace to handle so many tasks at once....

-- 
-Chuck