server seems busy

[zontrakulla]

[Sun Feb 28 18:03:19 2010] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawnin 8 children, there are 54 idle, and 208 total children
[Sun Feb 28 18:03:21 2010] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawnin 16 children, there are 50 idle, and 216 total children
[Sun Feb 28 18:03:22 2010] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawnin 32 children, there are 51 idle, and 232 total children
[Sun Feb 28 18:03:24 2010] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawnin 32 children, there are 59 idle, and 264 total children
[Sun Feb 28 18:03:25 2010] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawnin 32 children, there are 78 idle, and 296 total children
[Sun Feb 28 18:03:26 2010] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawnin 32 children, there are 95 idle, and 328 total children
[Sun Feb 28 18:03:33 2010] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawnin 8 children, there are 62 idle, and 367 total children
[Sun Feb 28 18:03:34 2010] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawnin 16 children, there are 59 idle, and 375 total children
[Sun Feb 28 18:03:35 2010] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawnin 32 children, there are 66 idle, and 391 total children
[Sun Feb 28 18:03:37 2010] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawnin 32 children, there are 86 idle, and 423 total children
[Sun Feb 28 18:03:39 2010] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawnin 32 children, there are 95 idle, and 455 total children
[Sun Feb 28 18:03:42 2010] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawnin 32 children, there are 97 idle, and 487 total children
[Sun Feb 28 18:03:51 2010] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawnin 8 children, there are 54 idle, and 526 total children
[Sun Feb 28 18:03:53 2010] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawnin 16 children, there are 43 idle, and 534 total children
[Sun Feb 28 18:03:56 2010] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawnin 32 children, there are 31 idle, and 550 total children
[Sun Feb 28 18:04:01 2010] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawnin 32 children, there are 17 idle, and 582 total children
[Sun Feb 28 18:04:02 2010] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawnin 32 children, there are 34 idle, and 614 total children

Timeout 30

KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
KeepAliveTimeout 2

<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
    StartServers         100
    MinSpareServers      100
    MaxSpareServers      200
    ServerLimit         1000
    MaxClients           700
    MaxRequestsPerChild 1000
</IfModule>

load average: 256.53, 256.07, 256.01  (and it goes up to 600 ... doesn't stop)
Tasks: 430 total, 258 running, 172 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie 
Cpu(s): 99.8%us,  0.2%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st 
Mem:  12325000k total,  9560280k used,  2764720k free,   183360k buffers 
Swap:  4200888k total,        0k used,  4200888k free,  8104812k cached

What should i do?

[ChrisRHS]

Yikes! That's some high loads. You need to figure out why your server is being overloaded. It could be Apache, a bad script, or, some type of attack. Remember, when you make changes to the maxclient variable, you must completely stop the server and restart it:

service httpd stop
service httpd start