big issues over the last couple of days on my webserver. it kept crashing… too many processes.
it came down to a combination of issues with spamassassin and apache.
Instead of having spamassassin called via procmail whenever emails came in, i turned on the spamd daemon so that will improve performance. I also have automatic virus scanning done via clamav and clamassassin. So now, every account on my webserver has spam and virus protection enabled.
after that, i started battling apache. it was kicking up way too many processes, and running the load average up to around 30. I finally figured out the proper combination of prefork, worker, and child settings to get everything to function smoothly, efficiently, and not overload the system.
now things seem to work.