Since the webserver plays an important part in the request serving process, it is important to tune it. A big part of this is the Apache child creation process. %StartServers% set to avg. # of requests you'd expect. %MaxSpareServers% keep this number high, to allow Apache to gracefully handle traffic spikes. %MaxClients% keep this number at about 2/5 of the maximum processes your server can handle. %MaxRequestsPerChild% ideally unlimited (0), but practically should be limited to a large number.