Apache Server Status, requests/sec vs. requests currently processed

Question

When I look the mod_status page I see the following (using mod_proxy to send request to tomcat):

9.56 requests/sec - 46.4 kB/second - 4970 B/request 193 requests currently being processed, 57 idle workers

Does requests currently being processed mean currently 193 requests are waiting a response from tomcat ? If it is so, there is a problem here right ? We should expect to see a similar number for requests/sec and requests currently being processed ? So this means tomcat is responding late (comparing to requests per second) ?

Mete

Answer 1

Not necessarily.

If you're returning large responses, it might be that it's taking a while to send.

If you enable Extended Status, you'll get a report that has the details of each connection. In the 'M' column you should see one of:

"_" Waiting for Connection, "S" Starting up, "R" Reading Request,
"W" Sending Reply, "K" Keepalive (read), "D" DNS Lookup,
"C" Closing connection, "L" Logging, "G" Gracefully finishing,
"I" Idle cleanup of worker, "." Open slot with no current process

If most of the stuff is R, then it might be Tomcat ... if it's mostly W, it's just taking a while to send to the users (who may have slow connections for whatever reason ... I once had someone point their iPhone app images on our server, and I had this behaviour for a few days 'til we got them to cache the images and serve 'em themselves.