wheel - 1:12 pm on May 27, 2011 (gmt 0)

I'm not an expert so following my advice can lead to bad things.

First, there are two numbers to look at in apache. One is how many live threads there are. The second is how many child threads each child can spawn. So maybe you have 10 threads running all the time, and each 10 can spawn another 10 - so when it's slow you've got 10, when it's busy you've got max 100.

Changing those numbers up and down can help I believe.

Secondly, I would just google something like 'optimizing apache'. There may be some easy tweaks. For example, you can turn of htaccess, so that apache doesn't have to look for an htaccess file every time it reads a file. Granted, that's only a small tweak.

Thirdly, be suspicious that this is actually apache. My first suspicion wouldn't be apache,it would be whatever database program you're using. Much more likely the server's going to bog down under the weight of database queries than apache. Apache on it's own can serve some unbelievable amount of queries.So this third suggestions should actually be my first suggestion :).

Perhaps the experts will provide better info.