My client sends out eblasts at 8am monday/wed/friday. Between 8:15-8:45 the site becomes extremely slow and many users sessions timeout.

My setup: Mediatemple VE 2gb dedicated ram (3 burst) Ubuntu 9.10 Apache2-mpm-worker PHP5.3-fcgi MySQL 5

I recently tried to remedy the problem by switching from apache2-mpm-prefork to mpm-worker, but am still having the same issues.

My apache settings are:

Timeout 100
KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
<IfModule mpm_worker_module>
    StartServers         12
    MinSpareThreads      25
    MaxSpareThreads      96
    ThreadLimit          96
    ThreadsPerChild      25
    MaxClients          225
    MaxRequestsPerChild   0
</IfModule>

The site is only getting ~10,000 page views during the 8am-9am hour, which I dont think should be stressing the server too badly. Maybe it is an error with the PHP settings, or bandwidth per unit time, or the site outgrew the server?

Any suggestions would be very helpful - as you can see i've given it a good go before looking for help (installed mpm-worker).

Also, can anyone suggest to me some free load testing software, or a tutorial on mod_status?

Thank you