As mentioned, this is on a single VPS with 256 MB of RAM. Each Apache process needs about 25 MB of (non-shared) RAM, so actually 8 is pushing it. We're using

As mentioned, this is on a single VPS with 256 MB of RAM. Each Apache process needs about 25 MB of (non-shared) RAM, so actually 8 is pushing it. We're using mpm_prefork. There's no additional proxy nor cache. My point, specifically, was how low you can go with a cheapo VPS. We hold up fine during an HN spike. (We're B2B and not a destination site, so our usual load is trivial.) Even during an HN spike you're getting tops of 2-3 visitors per second, which can be dished out reasonably well with 8 workers. The monit thing kicks in after a 30 second timeout. With the configuration above, we don't get that because of load, but rather when something else has gone wrong (specifically there's a wordpress plugin that our internal status blog uses that sometimes hangs). But given the original poster's issue of apache getting so out of control that it took him several minutes to get a live SSH connection and a system load of 60, having monit kill things (and restart them) is a preferable stop-gap. (Note: Our actual customer facing stuff is quite different; there we're using multiple servers behind an nginx proxy and using a combination of Rails, Sinatra and Java services. The basic web stuff is segregated off from those primarily for security reasons.)