Apache MPM prefork

How it Works ¶

A single control process is responsible for launching child processes which listen for connections and serve them when they arrive. Apache httpd always tries to maintain several spare or idle server processes, which stand ready to serve incoming requests. In this way, clients do not need to wait for a new child processes to be forked before their requests can be served.

The StartServers, MinSpareServers, MaxSpareServers, and MaxRequestWorkers regulate how the parent process creates children to serve requests. In general, Apache httpd is very self-regulating, so most sites do not need to adjust these directives from their default values. Sites which need to serve more than 256 simultaneous requests may need to increase MaxRequestWorkers, while sites with limited memory may need to decrease MaxRequestWorkers to keep the server from thrashing (swapping memory to disk and back). More information about tuning process creation is provided in the performance hints documentation.

While the parent process is usually started as root under Unix in order to bind to port 80, the child processes are launched by Apache httpd as a less-privileged user. The User and Group directives are used to set the privileges of the Apache httpd child processes. The child processes must be able to read all the content that will be served, but should have as few privileges beyond that as possible.

MaxConnectionsPerChild controls how frequently the server recycles processes by killing old ones and launching new ones.

This MPM uses the mpm-accept mutex to serialize access to incoming connections when subject to the thundering herd problem (generally, when there are multiple listening sockets). The implementation aspects of this mutex can be configured with the Mutex directive. The performance hints documentation has additional information about this mutex.