> The apache-server from which the accesses come, had MaxRequestsPerChild
> 1000, which is changed to 50 :-).
That is not necessarily a good thing; this means that
Apache will kill and re-spawn every child thread after
that child serves its 50th request. On a busy server,
you can cause serious server overload by constantly
killing/spawning processes in this fashion.
It depends on the modules you're using (do httpd -l to see),
but in general you should set MaxRequestsPerChild much
higher, unless 'top' output shows that memory usage
climbs over time (indicating a memory leak in one of
On some of my linux servers, MaxRequestsPerChild is set to 0,
which disables process recycling completely. On busy sites
it isn't unreasonable to set this value to 10000 or higher.