I apologize in advance if this is a basic question, but I am quite confused after reading the Apache documentation and other tutorials.

Does a single Apache prefork process serve all HTTP requests for a given client? That's what I thought, but when I reduce maxclients down to a low number, my page load times go to a crawl. This despite the fact I'm the only client on the server in question. This would suggest each process serves a single HTTP request at a time, rather than serving all requests within the TimeOut window.

So if a single webpage requires 15 HTTP requests to load fully, do I require 15 prefork Apache processes to optimally serve it?