I recently upgraded to from 1.17.0 to 1.18.0, upgraded all my extensions. It seems to be running OK. One extension we use heavily is External Data[1] (I installed the latest), and to solve the problem of dynamic external content it recommends I turn off caching using the instructions in the MW FAQ on meta [2]. I did so yesterday afternoon, and by this morning the server had completely maxed out it's memory (despite not having any users overnight) adn was spitting out errors into the php.ini (could not allocate, etc).
Trying to trace things down using top and ps, although I'm not as experienced as I'd like to be in linux, proved fruitless.
Is there any tips anyone could give me on figuring out what the problem is? I've turned chaching back on and it seems to be running OK, at a steady 400MB used for the system instead of the 4GB this morning. Restarting apache didn't affect anything.
I'm running MW 1.18.0 with Apache 2, PHP 5.3.3 (from redhat) w/ APC on CentOS 5.5
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:External_Data#Common_problems [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_FAQ#How_do_I_completely_disable_cac...
Thanks, Olivier Finlay Beaton
Turn off your extensions one by one and see if it still happening?
Also apart from ExternalData what other extensions are you running?
What's your configured memory_limit of php? If a request surpassed it, it would be cancelled, but not the total system memory shouldn't be surpassed (many concurrent requests?). I assume "the server had completely maxed out its memory" refers to the apache process?
Note that a php like MediaWiki cannot produce a memory leak in the server, as php frees all the memory used by the request and the end of it. Are you sure there were absulutely no requests that night? Perhaps it was crawled by e.g Googlebot.
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