I recently re-configured my httpd.conf configuration to enable KeepAlive, and it drastically improved the page load speeds. But, today I had a medium-sized spike in traffic. We're talking <10k pageviews. And my webpage slowed to a halt. Load times spiked from 2 seconds to 50-60 seconds. My website does not bring in a ridiculous amount of traffic... usually a lot <15k pageviews per day. It's a Wordpress blog with a decent amount of images, but not too many. My current KeepAlive configuration is the default one: KeepAlive on MaxKeepAliveRequests 100 KeepAliveTimeout 5 Code (markup): Should I change these values? Should I disable KeepAlive and just accept the mediocre page load speeds? If anyone can help me out... I'd be more than willing to donate via PayPal for your valuable time.
You need to turn off keepalive since Apache is being flooded by too many connections. Look into setting up nginx as a front in proxy/cache