title: Slow apache on ubuntu
body: <p>We have a pretty standard LAMP stack (Ubuntu 12.04 - Apache2 - MySQL - PHP), on a dedicated server with a large hosting provider.</p>
  
  <p>Since a couple of days we are experiencing slow web performance from time to time (requests would succeed but would sometimes take up to 10-15 seconds).</p>
  
  <p>I have tried to check the server usage with the <code>top</code> command, but nothing seems to indicate anything unusual or excessive usage (cpu usage would lie between 10-30%).</p>
  
  <pre><code>Tasks: 268 total,   2 running, 266 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
  Cpu(s):  4.2%us,  2.8%sy,  0.0%ni, 80.3%id, 11.3%wa,  0.0%hi,  1.4%si,  0.0%st
  Mem:   8070300k total,  7779400k used,   290900k free,    66648k buffers
  Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,  2799188k cached
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Does anybody have an idea what other stats I could check and in which direction I should continue searching?</p>