I haven't tried the other MPM plugins extensively, but it seems like the default should be "Don't use a ton of ram, don't fail if there's more than like 10 concurrent connections". Especially these days when people are ajax and cometting to their hearts content.

I guess one of the issues is that if you're using it with PHP/Python/etc, those expect to be in their own thread/process, so using more of a scalable async approach in apache isn't always possible.

I agree @ architecture + misconfiguration.