I'm trying to manage a server on Amazon for a network of sites that receives about 100 million pageviews per month. Unfortunately, nobody out of my team of 5 developers has much server admin experience.

Right now we have the MaxClients set to 1400. Currently our traffic is about average, and we have 1150 total Apache processes running, which use about 2% CPU each! Out of those 1150, 800 of them are currently sleeping, but still taking up CPU. I'm sure there are ways to optimize this. I have a few thoughts:

1. It appears Apache is creating a new process for every single connection. Is this normal?
2. Is there a way to more quickly kill the sleeping processes?
3. Should we turn KeepAlive on? Each page loads about 15-20 medium-sized graphics and a lot of javascript/css.

So, here's our Apache setup. We do plan on contracting a server admin asap, but I would really appreciate some advice until we can find someone.

Timeout 25
KeepAlive Off
MaxKeepAliveRequests 200
KeepAliveTimeout 5

<IfModule prefork.c>
StartServers         100
MinSpareServers      20
MaxSpareServers      50
ServerLimit          1400
MaxClients           1400
MaxRequestsPerChild  5000
</IfModule>

<IfModule worker.c>
StartServers         4
MaxClients           400
MinSpareThreads      25
MaxSpareThreads      75
ThreadsPerChild      25
MaxRequestsPerChild  0
</IfModule>

Full top output:

top - 23:44:36 up 1 day,  6:43,  4 users,  load average: 379.14, 379.17, 377.22
Tasks: 1153 total, 379 running, 774 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 71.9%us, 26.2%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  1.9%si,  0.0%st
Mem:  70343000k total, 23768448k used, 46574552k free,   527376k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free, 10054596k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 1756 mysql     20   0 10.2g 1.8g 5256 S 19.8  2.7 904:41.13 mysqld
21515 apache    20   0  396m  18m 4512 R  2.1  0.0   0:34.42 httpd
21524 apache    20   0  396m  18m 4032 R  2.1  0.0   0:32.63 httpd
21544 apache    20   0  394m  16m 4084 R  2.1  0.0   0:36.38 httpd
21643 apache    20   0  396m  18m 4360 R  2.1  0.0   0:34.20 httpd
21817 apache    20   0  396m  17m 4064 R  2.1  0.0   0:38.22 httpd
22134 apache    20   0  395m  17m 4584 R  2.1  0.0   0:35.62 httpd
22211 apache    20   0  397m  18m 4104 R  2.1  0.0   0:29.91 httpd
22267 apache    20   0  396m  18m 4636 R  2.1  0.0   0:35.29 httpd
22334 apache    20   0  397m  18m 4096 R  2.1  0.0   0:34.86 httpd
22549 apache    20   0  395m  17m 4056 R  2.1  0.0   0:31.01 httpd
22612 apache    20   0  397m  19m 4152 R  2.1  0.0   0:34.34 httpd
22721 apache    20   0  396m  18m 4060 R  2.1  0.0   0:32.76 httpd
22932 apache    20   0  396m  17m 4020 R  2.1  0.0   0:37.34 httpd
22933 apache    20   0  396m  18m 4060 R  2.1  0.0   0:34.77 httpd
22949 apache    20   0  396m  18m 4060 R  2.1  0.0   0:34.61 httpd
22956 apache    20   0  402m  24m 4072 R  2.1  0.0   0:41.45 httpd