Three requestors for fastCGI - 1 client served while others wait 5-9 seconds?

Good morning,

I'm experiencing an unusual problem and I don't know where the problem 
resides.  FastCGI boosted our applications performance several-fold, but we 
have a concern when dealing with more than one user.  I can duplicate the 
problem at will with this scenario:

"Set up two curl scripts  100 requests to our [F]CGI script each.  The test 
passes when one client is making a request.  As soon as two or more are 
incorporated, one client's requests are satisfied; and the other 2 or more 
clients sit there paused for 5 to 9 seconds.  The pause cycles through N 
number of clients; always leaving one client satisfied and N-1 clients 
paused for 5-9 seconds."

Is this a problem with the FastCGI configuration or in the Apache 
configuration?  I've been working on Apache servers for a while and have 
never seen this problem until FastCGI was introduced into one of our setups 
(hence the post here).

Another interesting tidbit is this - I assumed FastCGI would spawn several 
instances of the script.  I monitored our process list with a 'top' command 
and only saw one fastCGI instance of our script running the entire time it 
was satisfying the 3 clients.

I've attached our FastCGI configuration below.  We are running Apache on a 
Debian Linux server.  Any insight into the problem would be greatly 
appreciated.

Thanks,

- Mark

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