Well, I must say that I learned a good lesson while setting up Badvogato: when playing with modules, don't do /etc/init.d/apache reload! It turns out (supposedly) that this was what lead to my memory leak problems. I was frustrated with the lag involved in doing a restart, and would edit, make, and reload in a rather swift cycle.
So, it would appear that the proper thing to do would be to make sure that apache totally surrenders core and then begins afresh, as it's tough to swap out all kerbillion apache processes when they gobble up all your RAM. I'm considering looking into a PAM rss limitation or something to keep any one user from getting more than 90% of core.
Blah, so in a few hours someone will probably reboot the badvogato box, and it'll be up and running smoothly.
Oh yes, and I only just got the "virgule" joke. In French, "virgule" is the word for "/". mod_virgule:advogato::slashcode:slashdot