I have tried to fix this but don't know enough, apparently. When I run top command I see that its filled with httpd processes. When this happens my site stops loading. It doesn't crash it just spins and spins. I am using prefork MPM. This looks like:
<IfModule prefork.c>
StartServers 1
MinSpareServers 5
#MinSpareServers 1
MaxSpareServers 10
#MaxSpareServers 5
ServerLimit 25
#ServerLimit 50
MaxClients 25
#MaxClients 50
#MaxRequestsPerChild 10000
MaxRequestsPerChild 100
</IfModule>
This problem started with the defaults which are commented out. I then tried to make changes thinking that it would help if I lower the MaxClients because I have about 1gb ram available. I thought the default MaxClients was to high because the average memory usage per httpd process is 55mb. Here is a screenshot of top, keep in mind this doesn't show all the httpd processes.
top - 09:48:27 up 42 days, 3:13, 1 user, load average: 1.09, 1.09, 1.09
Tasks: 35 total, 3 running, 32 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 14.7%us, 0.5%sy, 0.0%ni, 84.8%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2097152k total, 1134676k used, 962476k free, 0k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 0k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1649 root 17 0 315m 122m 14m S 0.0 6.0 1:51.67 java
27755 mysql 18 0 204m 71m 5744 S 4.0 3.5 806:09.08 mysqld
23603 apache 15 0 76404 51m 5900 S 0.0 2.5 0:20.21 httpd
20408 apache 15 0 77124 51m 5252 S 0.0 2.5 0:25.57 httpd
28026 apache 16 0 76788 50m 5240 R 97.7 2.5 0:05.15 httpd
24497 apache 16 0 76272 50m 5484 S 0.0 2.5 0:06.55 httpd
27724 apache 15 0 76380 50m 5268 S 0.0 2.5 0:04.81 httpd
21561 apache 15 0 75672 50m 5532 S 0.0 2.4 0:28.54 httpd
26537 apache 16 0 75116 49m 5488 R 19.9 2.4 0:10.09 httpd
28027 apache 15 0 75080 49m 5216 S 0.0 2.4 0:03.07 httpd
24498 apache 15 0 74180 49m 5656 S 0.0 2.4 0:12.33 httpd
21934 apache 15 0 74568 48m 5256 S 0.0 2.4 0:27.48 httpd
24484 apache 15 0 74152 48m 5260 S 0.0 2.4 0:17.70 httpd
28012 apache 15 0 73248 47m 5208 S 0.0 2.3 0:02.34 httpd
13428 root 18 0 37032 15m 8456 S 0.0 0.8 0:00.21 httpd
What am I doing wrong?