Speed up your apache server running PHP

As soon as PHP run as FastCGI and no more inside an Apache module (mod_php4.so is not multi threaded), You should be able to switch the default MPM setting of Apache from MPM prefork to MPM worker.

So, what’s the difference between prefork and worker?

Quoting from the Apache MPM Prefork page: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/prefork.html
MPM Prefork implements a non-threaded, pre-forking web server that handles requests in a manner similar to Apache 1.3.

And for the Apache MPM Worker says: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/worker.html
MPM Worker implements a hybrid multi-process multi-threaded server. By using threads to serve requests, it is able to serve a large number of requests with less system resources than a process-based server.

Server: Strato (www.strato.de)
Operating system: SuSE / openSuSE
Requirements: root access and basic Unix knowledge