One of the things I have noticed on my aging server, which is going to be replace as soon as I can get my new one delivered to the data center where I do the co-location, is when I make a post from within WordPress, the HTTPD process seems to spawn anywhere from 5-8 children. These each then eat up 4-5% cpu process and 7.5-15 MB memory.
I am not sure why this is, but it then makes the server slow to a crawl on serving web pages, as the HTTPD process is completely maxed and running many children. I can understand that during the post it may need to do this, but after the post is done, and the page is reloaded the processes should go back down, but they are not doing that. And it is only when posting through WordPress that I find it does this. All of the various forum software I have ran on the server has never done this, nor has anything else that I have tried on here. And it seems to have only started after I did the upgrade to Wordpress 2.2.3 at the beginning of the year.
Case in point – I just made a post, and I now have close to 23 instances of HTTPD running on the server and it is not loading any pages (I am restarting the httpd daemon before hitting publish on this post). So I will be glad to get the new server online and get past this, since I have not had the time to find out why it is doing that.
