I have Apache running about 5 vhosts, few of which really get much in
the way of hits. If I run top, I see a lot of <defunct> httpd processes,
and each one is listed as using 1-5% of the CPU. They usually show up
and disappear in a cycle. Here is a sample:

top - 08:32:31 up 416 days, 8:14, 2 users, load average: 2.40, 2.36, 2.17
Tasks: 107 total,  5 running, 90 sleeping,  0 stopped, 12 zombie
Cpu(s): 56.3% us, 21.5% sy, 0.0% ni, 22.2% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem:  1027556k total, 1010636k used,   16920k free,  304016k buffers
Swap: 2040244k total,   31368k used, 2008876k free,  379012k cached

 PID USER    PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM   TIME+ COMMAND
6223 www     16  0   0   0   0 Z 2.3 0.0  0:00.07 httpd
<defunct>
6254 www     25  0   0   0   0 Z 2.3 0.0  0:00.07 httpd
<defunct>
6256 www     17  0   0   0   0 Z 2.3 0.0  0:00.07 httpd
<defunct>
6253 www     25  0   0   0   0 Z 2.0 0.0  0:00.06 httpd
<defunct>
6255 www     25  0   0   0   0 Z 2.0 0.0  0:00.06 httpd
<defunct>
6257 www     19  0   0   0   0 Z 2.0 0.0  0:00.06 httpd
<defunct>
6258 www     17  0   0   0   0 Z 2.0 0.0  0:00.06 httpd
<defunct>
6259 www     16  0   0   0   0 Z 2.0 0.0  0:00.06 httpd
<defunct>
6260 www     21  0   0   0   0 Z 2.0 0.0  0:00.06 httpd
<defunct>
6261 www     18  0   0   0   0 Z 2.0 0.0  0:00.06 httpd
<defunct>
6262 www     22  0   0   0   0 Z 2.0 0.0  0:00.06 httpd
<defunct>
6263 www     23  0   0   0   0 Z 2.0 0.0  0:00.06 httpd
<defunct>
18714 root    25  0 51196 28m 6628 R 1.0 2.8 400:42.72 httpd

The part that bothers me is that top shows over 50% cpu use, yet this
server is basically idle, and according to top itself, no other
processes other than httpd are up to much. The loadavg is pretty much
always at or above 1.9.

If I continually ls -l my log files directory, they are not growing, so
I assume the server isn't actually serving anything in that time.

Some more info:
Server version: Apache/2.0.52
Server built:  Jul 14 2007 11:53:18

<IfModule prefork.c>
StartServers     8
MinSpareServers   5
MaxSpareServers  20
ServerLimit    256
MaxClients     256
MaxRequestsPerChild 4000
</IfModule>
<IfModule worker.c>
StartServers      2
MaxClients      150
MinSpareThreads   25
MaxSpareThreads   75
ThreadsPerChild   25
MaxRequestsPerChild 0
</IfModule>

I appreciate any help. To be honest, I didn't look very hard on the
internet before posting this. My apologies if it has been covered
hundreds of times already.

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