Description of problem:
Under heavy (or moderate) load on a server serving dynamic web pages Apache's internal requests may consume all available Apache resources.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
httpd-2.2.3-11.el5_1.3


How reproducible:
difficult to reproduce, we ran 8 months without any problems

Steps to Reproduce:
1. set up a web-server with dynamic content
2. put it under stress /w hundreds of child-processes running simultaneously
3. watch legitimate client requests fight with Apache's internal requests
  
Actual results:
Site slowing down considerably. Internal requests stop only after Apache's Timeout-directive (RHEL default 120 seconds). Scoreboard has lot of Apache processes in "Sending Reply" -state. These hang up processes consume other resources too (DB-handles, etc.).

Expected results:
Smoothly running site with fast response time for legitimate users. No system resources wasted on Apache's own clumsiness.

Additional info:
The problem can be defeated using a couple of mod_rewrite -directives separating internal requests from others and telling them to "take a hike".

However, this is a gum/glue/duct tape workaround to save system resources. The problem in Apache does not go away by looking into another direction.