Is this a problem?

I've been using v1.18 for about a month now on two of my sites.  Apache
1.2.27, Digital UNIX machines ( dual 866 alphas, 2GB RAM, 100-full
network ), load balanced, the whole nine yards.  Combined, the two sites
usually pull down about 20 million requests a month.

What I'm seeing is a lot of this in the error logs:

[Tue Sep  2 14:23:12 2003] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to 
increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawning 8 children,
there are 21 idle, and 113 total children

and

[Tue Sep  2 14:23:12 2003] [error] mod_log_sql: child spawned but unable
to open database link

I'm having each server start 100 servers, minimum spares of 24, maximum
spares of 48.  MySQL  4.0.12 runs on one of the servers.  I have
max_connections set to 256 and the server reports max_used at 226.

My questions:
1) is the incessant "server seems busy" messages really a problem? 
Digging through the apache source, it appears that it'll complain like
this anytime more than 8 children are spawned at any given time.

2) is "unable to open database link" as serious as it sounds?  Can I
just assume that the module will preserve that entry and move along it's
merry way?

3) Should I look at tuning my SQL server a bit more?  I've read and
followed the stuff on MySQL.com... but it doesn't seem to help much.

One final question: the preserve process doesn't seem to flock() in any
way ( I can probably guess as to why ).  I see every once in a while
that a preserve file will become "mangled" because two children
attempted to write to it at the same time.  Is there a way to work
around this?  Something incredibly obvious and easy to implement would
be best;)

Thanks.

______
Jim Turner
Lead System Administrator
netINS, Inc.

____________________________________________________________________
Reminder: to unsubscribe, send email to <[email protected]>
with the words "unsubscribe mod_log_sql" in the body (w/o quotes).
The module homepage is http://www.grubbybaby.com/mod_log_sql/
The list archives are here:
http://news.gmane.org/thread.php?group=gmane.comp.apache.mod-log-sql