Check apache server-status without URL

It seems you are learning the hard way that PHP is a memory hog and not particularly scalable.

Some suggestions, in no particular order:

If you still suspect a memory leak set MaxRequestsPerChild to really low value.

Consider buying more memory, 360 megs is really not much nowadays.

Try finding an average size of httpd process by running ps or top and then setting MaxClients so that everything always fits in memory. Swapping is a death spiral, the slower you are processing the requests because of it, the more processes apache needs to fork, using even more memory.

If you laod php as a module in apache it gets loaded for every request, be it a script or a static file (an image or css or .js or whatnot). Consider serving static content from a separate server or using fastcgi or a reverse proxy like nginx to have apache serve only php to limit the number of fat php instances you have to keep in memory.

A few things you can check:

• The "Reading" status simply means that Apache is reading the request from the remote client. In FireBug, or a similar tool, you can see the "request" headers being sent. These are usually pretty small and shouldn't take long to process. A lot of Apache slots stalling in the "read" state indicates some sort of issue somewhere.
• Use a benchmarker like ApacheBench (ab) to test the speed of static files. If you run it on the server you should get a very high request rate (ex: 10-20k/sec) unless something is wrong. You can also run it remotely to see the difference speeds due to the network distance and speed.
• Are you sure that the client or server network speed is not an issue? The benchmark testing should be able to confirm this and give you an upper speed bound for it. For example, if your server is just on a 10 Mbps connection it can only supply around 25 files/sec if they are 50kb in size.
• Check Apache's server-status and your server's top and iostat to check for any obvious signs of over-usage in CPU, memory or IO. Make sure Apache's MaxClients is not set too high or too low (both are bad for different reasons).
• Consider using an alternative web server for static files like lighttpd or nginx. Depending on how you have Apache setup you could save a good amount of memory/CPU by letting Apache serve the dynamic files and something else the static files. For example, on my servers lighttpd can serve static files up to 20-30k/s with only 50 MB of RAM usage while Apache can "only" do 10-20k/s with 500 MB (the memory usage is the biggest advantage).
• Check the Apache, system, and application logs for any relevant error messages.
• Another thing to check is the number of incoming requests in Apache. If you get a sudden spike in incoming requests you may get a large number of "Reads" as your server attempts to deal with them all. This could be a normal spike or could be a form of DoS (either accidental or malicious). If you see many multiple connections from the same IP in server-status, or via netstat it may be a possible cause.