I can see that my server load increases to more than 200-300 range. Before 1 week the maximum load was around 20-25. In top and ps -ef i can see a lot of httpd threads and the PPID of most of the httpd request are of the same PID. When i verified this the parent process ID is of root. Please let me know how i can reduce the server load. I have searched a lot for this but not able to find out a proper solution for this. Please let me know. Please see below a part of the top output. apache 29698 2062 1 16:54 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 29700 2062 3 16:54 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 29701 2062 10 16:54 ? 00:00:02 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 29702 2062 0 16:54 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 29703 2062 1 16:54 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 29705 2062 0 16:54 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 29706 2062 3 16:54 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 29707 2062 0 16:54 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 29708 2062 1 16:54 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 29709 2062 0 16:54 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 29710 2062 0 16:54 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 29711 2062 0 16:54 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 29712 2062 0 16:54 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd Server version: Apache/2.2.3