Bug #10673: CURL/PHP causes lengthy Apache Keepalive

From: dave@backbeatmedia.com Operating system: Linux PHP version: 4.0.4pl1 PHP Bug Type: cURL related Bug description: CURL/PHP causes lengthy Apache Keepalive Greetings. I have Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) running with PHP/4.0.4pl1 installed as a module and CURL 7.7.1 added to that. Our web sites need to fetch a request from a remote ad server in real-time as each page is generated. If $adr is the request, I used to use: $success = @readfile($adr); But then I found CURL and saw that is (a) was more robust and (b) seems to be more efficient than readfile. So I now use CURL in he following way: $aje_ch = @curl_init($adr); @curl_setopt ($aje_ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 1); @curl_setopt ($aje_ch, CURLOPT_MUTE, 1); @curl_exec ($aje_ch); @curl_close ($aje_ch); This works great, except that if I have "Keepalive on" in my Apache configuration file, the httpd server sits in keepalive state for FAR longer when using CURL than it does when using readfile. In the course of 2 or 3 hours, my server would normally be at about 150 httpd processes running at any given point in time. But when using CURL, it jumps to 650 httpd processes, with the lions share (99%) of those sitting in the keepalive state for very long. It seems like the CURL requests are causing Apache to set its Keepalive timeout to something much higher than it should be. Setting "keepalive off" in Apache's conf file works around this problem, but decreases server efficiency. I'd love to solve this problem. Please help! :-) For the record, this was posted to the cURL bug tracker over on SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=100976&ai d=418860&group_id=976), and we went through quite a few gyrations with no success. Specifically, we tried disabling KeepAlive on the REMOTE server to see if that had any affect, and it did not. It seems not to matter what we request from, rather that any requests using PHP/cURL/Apache result in the LOCAL Apache bloating out of control with KeepAlive requests. Reverting back to readfile() based requests solves this problem but, well, cURL is better. ;-) All help would be appreciated, and I am available and willing to test anything on our servers. Thanks! -Dave -- Edit Bug report at: http://bugs.php.net/?id=10673&edit=1