"I don't know what the bottleneck is really, that is part of the problem. But I know that every now and then when we we get bursts of traffic I can find with a

"I don't know what the bottleneck is really, that is part of the problem. But I know that every now and then when we we get bursts of traffic I can find with a /server-status that 50 apache processing are in a write state." I think you do know what the problem is ;-) What is your PHP Error handling and logging set to? How big are your Apache access_log and error_log files? Cheers