Monitoring Apache processes with Datadog

Darron Froese, a Datadog Site Reliability Engineer, shared his experience of diagnosing and resolving memory issues on one of the servers hosting nonfiction's websites. The server was experiencing unresponsiveness due to large Apache processes consuming up to 1GB of RAM. To address this issue, they set memory limits for Apache + mod_php processes and monitored them using Datadog's DogStatsD. They also wrote a Ruby script to identify which sites were the memory hogs. Through these measures, they learned that keeping MinSpareServers and MaxSpareServers low can help reclaim idle server memory and improve overall system stability.