Why does the 'apachectl fullstatus' command hang up or fail to run?

Question

Why does the 'apachectl fullstatus' command hang up or fail to run?

Answer

The command can hang or fail due to multiple possible reasons. I am addressing two common causes in this article.

•  A large number of Apache connections causing the MaxRequestWorkers limit to be reached. For this situation, we have an article here for how to proceed:

How do I troubleshoot Apache MaxRequestWorkers errors?

•  If the server is force-redirecting "localhost" to https://, this can cause the process to hang. When the status is checked, it performs a connection to the following URL:

http://localhost:80/whm-server-status

Forcing localhost to redirect to https changes the URL to:

https://localhost:80/whm-server-status

The URL becomes an SSL connection on port 80, which is not going to be successful.

The resolution is to correct any custom redirects, or update Apache includes to exclude localhost from the https:// redirect.