How many connections/how much bandwidth can Apache handle?

Question

This is a request for pointers to good documentation/good articles. I'm looking for information on how many connections an Apache server can reasonably handle, and potentially how to load balance between multiple servers. I've done Google searches but it's harder for beginners to judge what are good docs.

Answer 1

Apache 1.3 had some nasty scalability limitations, but later versions are designed to scale with the hardware and operating system, making them the bottleneck rather than the web server itself. As always, though, it comes down to how you configure and tune it if you want uber performance. Each situation has its own demands, and they're documented here:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/misc/perf-tuning.html

The above assumes you're serving static content, which is where Apache excels. If you run webapps behind it, that's your bottleneck, not Apache.