[Catalyst] FCGI automatic restart / memory leaks

[Tobias Kremer]

I just deployed our quite large Catalyst app and I'm seeing a constant increase
in memory usage. Here's a current snapshop from top:

PID USER   PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
29342 www  16   0 67156  60m 3180 S    1  3.0   0:13.87 perl
29332 www  25   0 41052  34m 1204 S    0  1.7   0:00.01 perl
29333 www  25   0 68424  60m 3172 S    0  3.0   0:13.42 perl
29334 www  22   0 68944  60m 3308 S    0  3.0   0:13.58 perl
29335 www  16   0 67428  60m 3168 S    0  3.0   0:13.86 perl
29336 www  16   0 68736  60m 3192 S    0  3.0   0:13.88 perl
29337 www  16   0 67392  59m 3172 S    0  2.9   0:14.02 perl
29338 www  18   0 66404  59m 3180 S    0  2.9   0:13.49 perl
29339 www  17   0 69216  62m 3172 S    0  3.1   0:14.12 perl
29340 www  16   0 67992  60m 3188 S    0  3.0   0:13.89 perl
29341 www  16   0 68812  60m 3180 S    0  3.0   0:14.88 perl

We're using lighttpd and handle the starting of the FCGI server manually. Is
there a way to have the FCGI children restart once in a while without having to
restart the whole FCGI process manager (and bringing down the application for a
few seconds)? Something like Apache's MaxRequestsPerChild directive would be
cool.

Then it's time to go memory leak hunting :(

Thanks a lot!

--Tobias