high load

[pgentoo]

I found similar issues with fastcgi php processes as you've mentioned, however not to the same extent because I only have a few domains on the server currently. However, with a max children setting of 3 in my fcgi starter script, i'd check and see 20 some processes for a single site.

It looks like there is a bug with php when setting this value, in that if the process has an error, it gets orphaned and not cleaned up properly.

I decided to comment out the lines in the fcgi starter script, and run just on the global settings in mod_fcgid settings. This works perfect for me, and i haven't seen any errors caused by the changes yet.

Maybe give that a try...