Good morning,

I've had a strange problem with Apache twice in the past week, and I'm out of ideas as to what might be going on. 

Here's the background: I run a website that uses a plain-vanilla Apache server to serve images, and uses mod_proxy to forward requests for everything else to a backend mod_perl server on a different port on the same ip address.  (I think this scenario used to be documented here: http://perl.apache.org/docs/1.0/guide/install.html#Installation_Scenarios_for_mod_perl_and_Other_Components, but it doesn't appear to be there anymore.)

The problem that I ran into is that after running on the same configuration for years, and without a reboot for a month or so, the plain-vanilla Apache server  stopped serving requests. 

• My first try was to execute apachectl stop and then apachectl start.  apachectl printed: "/usr/local/apache-light/bin/apachectl start: httpd started".  However, it wasn't running (which I verified by trying to run apachectl status and then apachectl stop).
•  The first time this happened, I was running Apache 1.3.37.  I downloaded the tarball for Apache 1.3.41 and installed that in place of 1.3.37.  The second time this error occurred it occurred with 1.3.41.
• No messages were written to the access_log or error_log 
• /usr/local/apache-light/bin/apachectl configtest returned "Syntax OK"
• apachectl points to the correct pidfile (at least it's the one specified in /usr/local/apache-light/conf/httpd.con), and it looks to me like root has perfectly reasonable rights to the pidfile.

I was eventually able to restart the apache process the first time by deleting the pidfile.  When I ran apachectl start without a pidfile, the apache process started up and ran without problems for 3 days.  The second time this happened, it wasn't enough to delete the pid file.  I again reinstalled apache, and went so far as to reboot the server.  (fsck did not find any errors on reboot.)  This time, I was only able to restart the sever after running the following:

[root@data2]# touch /usr/local/apache-light/logs/httpd.pid
[root@data2]# rm -f /usr/local/apache-light/logs/httpd.pid