Total Accesses Increasing very Fast – Apache mod_status

This looks like you have some requests that never terminate, forcing Apache to spawn new processes until the configured maximum is reached. After that, Apache has no option to create new processes for new requests and appears dead.

It's impossible to tell what might cause this with the few data you give us.

Do you see any hints in the log files? What kind of pages to you serve to the clients? Static HTML, PHP, CGI or something else? On what OS?

My apologies if you know this already, but just to be clear, the Min and MaxSpareServers are suggestions for the number of idle workers. Apache can and will go above or below these configured values. MaxClients is a dead limit, in mpm_prefork's case the limit on the forked workers.

As for why you're at 49 idle workers, Apache should only respond to client client load. If this is a recently restarted server then there must be something that chews up workers upon startup. If it's not recently restarted then Apache will adjust it's long term target for idle workers, and it's probably around 50 currently. There could be other reasons, owning to your configuration...