jbert has provided some excellent pointers. In addition to those remarks, your exclamations on extreme long response times suggests this might also be a case of memory shortage/page swapping on the server.

Some ideas:
- investigate system memory usage (page swapping?)
- benchmark a single, non-concurrent- request
- in general modperl may improve perf. dramatically
- if needed you could offload part of the application to another server to split up service requests between servers

In reply to Re: Why can code be so slow? by varian
in thread Why can code be so slow? by freakingwildchild

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