Heavy memory usage

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Hello everyone,

Recently
I've noticed that httpd processes started to consume massive amounts of
memory - after some time pretty much using almost all of the 2GB of RAM
the server has and I don't have any memory left for other stuff. Here's
what top tells me (I have added the "data" column at the end as well):

17870 apache 15 0 285m 165m 33m S 0 8.1 6:55.43 134m httpd
15819 mysql 16 0 178m 36m 4868 S 0 1.8 4:54.98 167m mysqld
17865 apache 15 0 288m 166m 32m S 0 8.1 1:51.49 134m httpd
7266 apache 15 0 166m 36m 22m S 0 1.8 1:48.75 14m httpd
31768 apache 15 0 281m 150m 24m S 0 7.4 1:34.26 127m httpd
17869 apache 15 0 281m 156m 29m S 0 7.6 1:19.61 127m httpd
22063 apache 15 0 279m 151m 24m S 0 7.4 1:14.49 127m httpd
26292 apache 18 0 282m 156m 28m S 0 7.6 0:40.63 128m httpd
3197 apache 15 0 279m 151m 24m S 0 7.4 0:38.18 127m httpd
17857 root 18 0 160m 14m 5824 S 0 0.7 0:00.24 8872 httpd
It
seems to me that each httpd process does not free the memory after
handling a request. So they all sit at ~270MB which is BAD. Is there a
way for me to know where all the memory goes and why it stays that way?
I haven't done any server tweaking lately, so I'm sure it's not me who
messed something up (haven't had the problem before).

The
server is used to serve PHP apps and Apache itself is configured with
prefork module and MaxRequestsPerChild is set to 4000.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.




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