Why Prefork MPM is Deprecated for High-Traffic Workloads
The legacy Apache prefork MPM spawns a separate OS process for every incoming connection. Each process consumes 25-50 MB of RAM, quickly exhausting server memory at just 200 concurrent visitors.
The Event MPM Architecture
Event MPM uses dedicated listener threads to handle keep-alive connections asynchronously, passing requests to worker threads only when active data arrives. This reduces RAM overhead by over 80%.
Optimized mpm_event.conf Directives
Tune MaxRequestWorkers, ThreadsPerChild, and AsyncRequestWorkerFactor to match CPU core counts and available RAM allocations.