mod_fastcgi not playing nice with Apache?

I have a peculiar situation which crept up only a few weeks ago and I 
have been able to narrow it down to RequestTracker + mod_FastCgi.

About 3 weeks ago, I updated to the latest FC2 kernel and a number of 
other nondescript packages.  Around the same time, I started 
experiencing, on a nightly basis around 4:20am, where the web server 
would become unresponsive.  The server was running, but not handling any 
requests.  Restarting the web server would bring it back on-line until 
the next evening.

I'll omit all of the debugging here as it would not be relevant, but 
suffice it to say that at 4:20am, logrotate would come along and kill 
-USR1 httpd after rotating the logs, which was the same time that things 
tanked out.  Sounds like an Apache problem, right?

Well, I dug further, and recompiled the custom modules that we utilize 
(mod_auth_ldap2 and mod_fastcgi) to use the newer version of the web 
server.  We're pretty stuck on mod_fastcgi 2.4.0 because 2.4.2 does not 
support running FastCgiServer processes within VirtualHosts (who thought 
disabling that was a good idea?!).

Long story short, it turns out that, upon startup, if a FastCGI server 
is configured to run, *most* of the httpd processes fork off and run as 
root (bad) with the remaining 2 or 3 processes running as the apache 
user (not including the parent process, of course).  In the situations 
where the server was unresponsive from 4:20am, all of the processes were 
running as root.  So, if all of the processes were running as root, the 
web server is completely unresponsive.

Essentially what is happening is that apache forks off its children, 
some are running as "apache", most are running as "root".  The ones 
running as "root" are just hanging out there.. when the kill -USR1 comes 
along, it stops all of the "apache" owned processes, but the root ones 
hang around like dead leaves on a tree.

So, back to the debugging, if I disable the FastCgiServer processes 
(just commenting them out) and start up the server, everything comes up 
just fine; all of the httpd server processes come up as they should with 
all of them being owned by the "apache" user.  If I have the 
FastCgiServer processes enabled, then 2 or 3 of forked web server 
processes run as apache, the rest run as root..

Is this just us?! Could this be kernel related?  I've personally been 
using RT with mod_fastcgi for ages.. it is just plain odd that it has 
tanked out on us like this.

I would prefer *not* to move back to mod_perl as I have been very happy 
with mod_fastcgi up until now.

As a note, I have tried mod_fastcgi 2.4.0, 2.4.2, and the SNAP version 
just to see what happens.  All behave the same way.. :(

-Rich
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