How can I prevent tons of apache processes spawning when I start apache and proceeding to kill my machine?

Question

I have a highly trafficked application on one debian machine and apache has started acting strange.

Every time I start apache, tons of apache processes are spawned, the

Answer 1

This question is ancient, but I feel compelled to add an answer here because all of the existing answers are overlooking a key piece of information from the OP: After the load has begun to rise for a few minutes, top reports that there are still ample CPU & memory resources available. There is usually one culprit remaining, and that's I/O.

Check if there is a full partition with df -h. If not, see if your application is thrashing the disk using vmstat 1 10 or iostat 1 10 (these are provided by the 'sysstat' package on Debian/Ubuntu). If you still don't see an issue there, perhaps you have device level I/O errors or network trouble for network-mounted storage. Check the system and daemon log files.