Our test suite can report success even when the Apache server crashed. The test suite should detect httpd crashes and report failure, if only to alert people that the apache/MPM they are using may have bugs. I found this when running Subversion trunk@1646184 with Apache 2.4.7 with the 'event' MPM, on Ubuntu 14.04. There is a known issue with the 'event' MPM crashing in several 2.4.x versions, fixed in later versions (>= 2.4.10 ?). Philip wrote: [...] I think it is possible for apache to crash without triggering a test failure: if the crash happens when accepting a connection and no other threads in the process are active then I suspect serf's retry logic may simply reconnect to a new process. Searching the error_log may be the only way to detect these crashes. See email thread "Test suite doesn't detect httpd crashes" started on 2014-12-07, archived at e.g. <http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2014-12/0095.shtml> or <http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/subversion-dev/201412.mbox/%3C1418820966.90126.YahooMailNeo@web87703.mail.ir2.yahoo.com%3E>.