We have several sites running on one server. (CentOS, Hostgator "Elite") A few of the sites are fairly large and our main site is large enough that Google has indexed > 1,000,000 pages.
I complained to HG (I have a managed dedicated server) about some images not loading, even though they are present on the server. Refreshing the page will generally allow those images to load. It's not always the same images that fail, it's somewhat random. I've seen this happen on at least 3 of our sites on this server.
They suggested that I change my MPM Module to prefork because it handles memory a little differently
I found advice online to help me determine that my server is currently running worker.c.
Some of the images are being served through a php script that sends a jpg header and then does readfile($filename);
to serve the images, but it's not just images from that script that I've seen the problem with.
Is the advice to switch to prefork a good idea? Is it likely to help with the issue I'm having?