I am running an Apache 2 webserver on a
Pentium 4 2.8GHz with 2GB RAM. The function of the webserver is as a tag ser
ver i.e. it is serving a 1x1 pixel GIF and logging these requests. The size 
of the image is 43 bytes, the total size of a request is typically 500 bytes
. The machine is serving 1 million requests per day. 

I am have performance monitoring software checking the request times, and du
ring peak times (lunchtime, early evenings), these are very slow - between 2
 and 20 seconds to serve this GIF.

1. Based on the above spec. machine, is this a poor performance? I thought A
pache was capable of much higher performance.

2. Is there a way of tweaking the Apache settings to improve the response ti
mes?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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A follow-up to this post:

The solution was to enable mod-status on the web server. This revealed that 
the connections were being hogged by keep-alives and processes remaining fro
m gracefully restarting. This was causing new requests to be queued up. Redu
cing the KeepAliveTimeout, increasing MaxClients and restarting the server (
by stopping and starting it) solved the problem - response time went from 20
 seconds to 0.2 seconds.

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