I installed Apache 2.2 from the Debian repository (6.0/Squeeze). By default, Debian installs the prefork module and comes with the following (default) configuration:
<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
StartServers 5
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 10
MaxClients 150
MaxRequestsPerChild 0
</IfModule>
Looking at the scoreboard on the status page, I see there are 256 workers available:
Current Time: Sunday, 05-Jun-2011 22:50:00 CEST
Restart Time: Saturday, 04-Jun-2011 05:49:50 CEST
Parent Server Generation: 3
Server uptime: 1 day 17 hours 9 seconds
Total accesses: 208737 - Total Traffic: 4.6 GB
CPU Usage: u1.08 s.18 cu0 cs0 - .000854% CPU load
1.41 requests/sec - 32.6 kB/second - 23.0 kB/request
1 requests currently being processed, 9 idle workers
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I wonder whether it actually is 256, since the list of requests ranges from 0 to 149. Due to a (yet-to-be-discovered) bug, Apache grinds to a halt with 150 active servers, which matches the MaxClients
setting. I wonder if the display with 4 rows of 64 characters is misleading and should display 150 characters in total.