We are running Red Hat 7.2 (Kernel 2.4.7-10) with Apache 2.0.49 (using simple configurations, nothing fancy, compiled from the sources). This friday morning we had a call from our customer that their web site was down. We noticed that this was the case for 100 other customers too. We also noticed that this was because Apache wasn't running. Of course we tried to start it but it wouldn't start. First it was because the PID-file existed. Erasing it helped a bit - Apache is running again.. but it died immediteally after the first request. So we thought to check the semaphore arrays if they were filled up - clearing them didn't help either. After 30 minutes when we had tried everything.. we checked the error log and saw it was huge (though there was nothing intresting). We tried rotating it.. and voila, apache runs smooth and fine again. The error log was 2147483647 bytes in size. My guess is, when apache tried to write something in the log, it crashed somehow because it was so huge. Apache only crashed on pages which had missing images or anything else that caused an entry in the error log.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 13511 ***