maxclient issue on apache1

to increase the reliablity of apcache1.

[ephdia]

Hello Everybody,
I am using linux(RHEL4) OS(intel pentium4 3GHz,512MB RAM,40GB HDD) and apache1 web server.Mine is adserving server and it is running normally till yesterday before,but unexpectedly i got "error :maxclient reached " from apache then my apache got hang up.It was happening continously.Then i do seach on this error and got suggestion to increase my maxclient(NOTE:now i had 256 maxclients).
I was advised to increase HARD_SERVER_LIMIT in src/include/httpd.h.
Now i got lot of doubts in my way that is,
1)what are the procedure and constrains to increase maxclient?how many max client i can have as per the above configuration?
2)Is there any command to check out the number of users on our web server?
3)Is there any tool to check the load of apache in easy way?

how come i do make my apache to percieve heavy load?

Please help me.
Thanks in advance.

[jdMorgan]

If clients connect to your server and fetch only one item (such as an advertisement image) and not multiple items (such as HTML pages and JavaScript files), then it may be a great benefit to disable KeepAlive on this server. That will prevent Apache from keeping server threads active expecting more requests from the same client.

If you do disable KeepAlive, be sure to document the change thoroughly in the config file, because disabling KeepAlive may badly effect performance if the server were to be used for more than just serving one item to each client in the future.

Jim

[ephdia]

Thanks jdMorgan.But my server's clients are fetching multiple items, so i couldn't go with disabling keep alive.Please any more suggestions on it.