Apache : 165 Failed Requests out of 202 ?!

[alragom at yahoo.com (Firas R.)]

Hi everyone,

I've just been trying out Apache's benchmark tool to get an idea of
our web server's performance and I keep getting a high number of
Failed requests as is shown in ab's output below.

I tried changing the following settings in the httpd.conf file :

MinSpareServers 5     --> 30
MaxSpareServers 10    --> 60

But that doesn't seem to have made much of a difference. It is a high
volume site, but why so many Failed requests ?? We're running
apache-1.3.14, php-4.0.4, and a mysql back-end. The server is a Dual
PIII 733 with 1G RAM, so it's not under powered. Please let me know
how to go about fixing this, and any suggestions or references on how
to optimize the web server are more than welcome. Oh and I forgot to
mention, I just installed APC (caching module) for PHP, but from ab's
results, it doesn't seem to have made any improvement, although the
site's actual responsiveness has improved tremendously ?!

Thanks in advance,
Firas

This is the output from top :

  4:33am  up  7:36,  2 users,  load average: 0.35, 0.63, 0.86
276 processes: 274 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 11.2% user, 15.7% system,  0.0% nice, 73.0% idle
Mem:  1036100K av, 841824K used, 194276K free, 391076K shrd,  37964K
buff
Swap: 104416K av,    684K used, 103732K free                574300K
cached

And this is the output from ab :

[foo at bar bin]# ./ab -t 30 -c 5 http://www.oursite.com/php/index.php
This is ApacheBench, Version 1.3c <$Revision: 1.45 $> apache-1.3
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd,
http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 1998-2000 The Apache Group, http://www.apache.org/

Server Software:        Apache/1.3.14
Server Hostname:        www.oursite.com
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /php/index.php
Document Length:        19928 bytes

Concurrency Level:      5
Time taken for tests:   30.071 seconds
Complete requests:      202
Failed requests:        165
   (Connect: 0, Length: 165, Exceptions: 0)
Total transferred:      4070405 bytes
HTML transferred:       4036745 bytes
Requests per second:    6.72
Transfer rate:          135.36 kb/s received

Connnection Times (ms)
              min   avg   max
Connect:       74   160  3154
Processing:   342   562   902
Total:        416   722  4056


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