Sun Microsystems has released a how-to detailing tuning your Apache web server for maximum performance.
“Setting up and configuring your Web server is a reasonably simple process for which most installations provide scripts. Optimization involves tweaking your server to achieve maximum performance. This is not well documented and is anything but automated. This article provides some simple tactics you can employ to improve your Web server's performance, and where appropriate it points to tools and information sources that will help you achieve even greater performance gains. “