steven n fettig's Jitterin' Thoughts

Of all the positive things I have said (and thought) about RedHat 8.0 recently, I just found my biggest gripe - and to me it is serious. (Although I will comment soon on some gripes about FreeBSD - perhaps really relating to VMWare.) Whoever thought it a great idea to use Apache 2.x as the standard web server on RedHat has made a mistake. I have tested the latest Apache server setup on RedHat 8.0 on 3 different machines and have found the performance to be horrendously slow. (A post I left on comp . infosystems . www . servers . unix makes me almost look too stupid to ask such a question, but I do think I know what I am talking about here.) I may not have the most ideal setup, but I have done everything I know and read on how to tweak the performance of apache. Here's what I've found:
1) It takes an average of 1 second per hit/request to get a response
2) mySQL acts slower than molasses
3) Oh, and while I am doing benchmark testing (subjecting the server to 1000 plus hits) CPU usage never goes above 20%!
I am well aware that open source software requires some patience, but considering a server I have running FreeBSD and apache 1.3.x takes about 1/8th of a second to respond to each hit/request - and the fact that this server's processor speed is half of the other test machines - I find this unacceptable. On top of all this, there is no documentation I have come across that shows apache 2.x to offer any performance increase or better response over 1.3.x
Perhaps I'm the stupid one here, but did it make any sense for RedHat to have a not-ready-for-production server as the default on their workstation/server installs?
I don't think so...