webdoctor - 9:20 pm on Nov 7, 2009 (gmt 0)

Can you recommend any values for the settings

Can you post your current settings? How many visitors/pages is your server handling, and what else is running on this VPS (databases, mailservers, ...)?

"Optimising" usually implies something works reliably, but that performance can be improved. If your server is crashing frequently then I wouldn't call this "optimising", but "making it work"

For reference, my baby VPS has these settings

StartServers 1
MinSpareServers 1
MaxSpareServers 3
ServerLimit 15
MaxClients 15
MaxRequestsPerChild 0

but this server runs a *very* small site, so these values are unlikely to be appropriate for your site.

On the other hand, my server has an uptime > 300 days (it's pretty stable) so perhaps you should try these settings? :-)

Are you using sysstat (or similar) to log the load on your server? Might also be worth checking out Apache's mod_status module too.