before this started happening i changed max request time up to 60 cleanup delay to 6 max requests to 640000 as well as increased the min number of servers to 8. i thought those changes would be pretty harmless, should i have been more careful with themmaybe max_requests is too high as well, i was just taking a shot in the dark. the comments in the conf file said useful range from 256 -> infinity.Setting max_requests high won't affect anything.
any other ideas? it hasn't happened ONCE in debug mode... joe