Upon restarting Apache for an upgrade, I noticed that all of the child threads were going defunct immediately after beginning and load promptly soared to unheard of levels on our production server. It turns out our /var/log/www/access_log was at 2GB so log writes were failing and the child thread would die out. /var/log/www/error_log had plenty of space left, but the child thread did not write there. It just died. It had no fatal errors, it just died. Do you see the problem? This is extremely poor error handling -- this is a webserver, not a compiler. The number one job is to stay on-line and performing. Everything else is secondary, including whether or not the log service is functioning.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 13511 ***