PUBLIC MARKS from holyver with tags benchmark & tuning

Apache prefork, StartServers, MaxSpareServers and MinSpareServers In the most common case, you will be using Apache in the prefork mode, meaning one process per connection, with a pool of processes pre-forked to standby for connections. The number of spare processes is defined by the values MaxSpareServers, MinSpareServers, while the number to start is defined by StartServers.