Gentoo server with suPHP cannot create child processes - out of memory

Question

The exact error message is this:

12)Cannot allocate memory: couldn't create child process: /usr/sbin/suphp for <php script file>

This is not a VPS, it's a generic Gentoo server. There is 1G of RAM for the server and 700M of RAM free at any given time, including when running this rather tiny script that only creates 1 connection to a MySQL DB. There's a cron job that runs this script every 30 seconds and suPHP runs out of memory almost every single time.

Can anybody please help?

Answer 1

Use something like <?php print system('ulimit -a'); ?> to check system limits. Check apache configuration for RLimitMEM directive.