Windows – How to find apache PID for child processes on windows

I've had success with Sysinternals Process Explorer. With this, you can search to find what process(es) have a file open, and you can use it to close the handle(s) if you want. Of course, it is safer to close the whole process. Exercise caution and judgement.

To find a specific file, use the menu option Find->Find Handle or DLL... Type in part of the path to the file. The list of processes will appear below.

If you prefer command line, Sysinternals suite includes command line tool Handle, that lists open handles.

Examples

• c:\Program Files\SysinternalsSuite>handle.exe |findstr /i "e:\" (finds all files opened from drive e:\"
• c:\Program Files\SysinternalsSuite>handle.exe |findstr /i "file-or-path-in-question"

Tracking down WHAT is causing the problem can be a pain in the ass. The first thing I'd do if I had a problem like that is reduce MaxRequestsPerChild to an aggresively low number (~100-200) and see if that makes a difference. If it does, then you probably have code that is leaking memory in a loop somewhere and you'll want to run a code audit.

Another thing to look at is Apache's fullstatus, see if you can find out what particular request is causing the memory leak. Get the PIDs on your suspected processes and run an strace on them.