Ok this is what we have figured out so far:
Our Systems folks upgraded our web servers and in the process lost some of our initial configuration options. Here are the important options in Apache and what they do:
Timeout: 300 This is how long apache will wait for a response before it times out a session.
Keepalives: On This allows for multiple requests across the same session to the servers ala HTTP/1.1
MaxKeepaliveRequests: 0 This is the number of requests the server will allow across the same pipe before it closes the connection. 0 means no limit.
KeepAliveTimeout: 15 This is the amount of time the Apache server will wait after the last request for another request before closing the session.
The values shown above are what we ended up with after some experimentation. What we had before was Timeout 300/Max Requests 100/Idle timeout: 150. So what was happening was that when you connect to our web site you download 40-50 objects on the front page, the session stays open if you didn't spend 150 seconds on the first page, then when you go to the subsequent pages you eventually hit the 100 request limit when the server summarily closes the connection and the client just hangs with a partial page load.
Anyway the tuning vairable above have fixed alot of our issues..
-Geoff
