> The easiest thing to try is to turn off keepalives so child processes > aren't hanging around keeping connections up.
KeepAliveTimeout defaults to 5 seconds, so that shouldn't be a significant problem, and you get the efficiency of persistence and probably pipelining too. Could be worth reducing some of the tcp timers (the *_WAIT ones) if your netstat is full of CLOSE_WAIT/TIME_WAIT etc sessions (which will be more of a problem if you turn off keepalives). But completely agree, if your mysql is sluggish, it will mean apache processes hang around for longer than they need to and therefore build up and use more memory. Use top then shift-m for quick overview of memory use.
