Hey there.

I recently installed Debian testing on a server and set up apache/mysqld. I've used apache on my home box, and it has always been quite responsive despite only having DSL. But for some odd reason, the apache on this server runs wonderfully for about a minute, slows down sending pages for a few seconds, then stops sending pages all together.

Most of the site it is hosting uses PHP and MySQL heavily, but because html files/images seem to be suffering from the same problem, I'm willing to bet that I can't shift the blame onto mysqld for this one.

The apache config is 500-600 lines shorter than the default one, and it excludes quite a few things you'd find by default, so I can't understand why that apache would be slower than the one on my home box.

I have been playing with the prefork stuff (MaxRequestsPerChild, Min/MaxSpareServers, etc), but nothing seems to fix this odd behavior.

Apache is version:
Server version: Apache/1.3.33 (Debian GNU/Linux)
Server built: Jan 20 2005 03:29:20
and PHP is version 4.3.10-2.

I've googled around for informtion on tuning apache, but everything is just the same four or five things over and over. I've fiddled with the prefork stuff a lot and not noticed much of a change. I've disabled the symlinkbyowner stuff. Yadda yadda. It just isn't helping.

The server using using any swap, so I know that isn't slowing it down, and the load is <.5, so that isn't the problem, either. And it isn't as if the server comes under a massive load as soon as it goes up. There are perhaps two or three people browsing.

Here's my base apache config. See anything that would be causing problems?

httpd.conf.

The stuff in the virtualhost configs isn't all that radical, so I really doubt that's what is causing a problem.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks for your time.