ColdFusion 9 Crashed, No Clues Other Than an Apache Entry

We are on a Windows Server 2003 VPS running ColdFusion 9, Apache 2.2, and MySQL. We host approximately 75-85 sites on this server running on a shared codebase(homegrown CMS).

At around 1:05-1:10 EST, none of the sites were responsive. Attempting to visit any of the sites resulted in an immediate browser error – site could not be found. My initial assumption was that something had happened with Apache, so I restarted it. This did not resolve the problem, so we restarted ColdFusion. Once ColdFusion came back up, the sites returned to normal.

Now I am in the process of diagnosing the problem, and the logs have not been helpful. All of the CF logs do not have any entries in that time period, so I went to Apache. The only thing I can find in Apache’s error log is:

[Thu Apr 07 13:07:17 2011] [warn] Server ran out of threads to serve requests. Consider raising the ThreadsPerChild setting

There’s nothing else in the Apache log that indicates other issues.

I did a little research on this, and it appears that ThreadsPerChild can be configured by uncommenting the include from httpd.conf and then modifying httpd-mpm.conf. I’m a little hesitant to start playing with these settings because I’m not sure if this is even the root cause of the problem.

A quick search of error.log shows that we receive this error message 2-4 times per day, and this is the first time (that I am aware of) that we have had a problem like this.

So, I guess my question ultimately is: Is this error message something that has the potential to bring ColdFusion down, or am I looking in the wrong place?

Any suggestions that could be offered would be greatly appreciated.

Answer

Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Sean Walsh , Answer Author : Shane Madden