On my Centos 5 (32-bit) I have the following configuration. <IfModule prefork.c> StartServers 10 MinSpareServers 10 MaxSpareServers 20 ServerLimit 100 MaxClients 100 MaxRequestsPerChild 1000 </IfModule> My problem is that Apache will not make more than 10 processes to accomodate my traffic. I have plenty of RAM for it to do so. I've even set StartServers/MinSpareServers to 50 and MaxSpareServers to 80. Only 10 were created after restarting to apply the changes. I have restarted Apache several times and it didn't fix my issue. I've even reinstalled it and my whole machine and setup the configuration manually again.