How do I limit the requests

Hello all,
I had been running my site on a 500MHz cpu with 512 MB RAM for the past 2 years with no problem.
About 3 months ego I went to rackshack and got a 1.7GHz Celeron with 1012 MB RAM with Cpanel installed.

Eversince I switched, My site goes does at least 3 times a day.
The requests come in and after a while the server does not respond anymore to a pint where I have to manually restart it.
Because of this, I am having less users. My traffic has decreased to about 1/3 of what it used to be and I still have problems.

Apache keeps inceasing the number of clients, but it makes the problem worse, because now the server tries to handle even more requests and stays down longer.

Here is what I think would solve the problem. If anyone can tell me how I
d really appreciate it and also if you have another solution, please do let me know.

1. I want to limit the connection from teh same IP address to 5
If someone comes to the site and tries to oen a page, teh page does not start so he keeps refreshing the page thinking there is something wrong with his connection. This in turn makes the processes more and more.
By limiting this, I am hoping to take care of of some of the problem.


2. I would like to limit the number of processes apache can handle to 100 and do not want apache to automatically incease this number.

3. I want to limit the time for a process to say 30 seconds. If in 30 seconds the requests is not answered, it should simply cancel it and process the other requests.

4. If the limit is reached I want to show a message to the user that the server has reached its maximum capacity, try again in a few minutes.



Note: My site relies heavily on cgi and MySQL.
Using RexHad Linux 7.3, Perl 5.6, MySQL 4

Thanks so much

 

Anyone?