Hello,

> Yes, but 30 seconds looks very very long, eveb on
> small machines. I only heard about so long startup w/
> old version of apache 1.3 w/ mass hosting.
> Even on my HP 715@33Mhz I used in the past, Apache +
> PHP starts in 5 seconds.

I had apache 1.3.something, MySQL ( without innodb to save memory ) and PHP4 on a 110MHz MicroSPARC II, no external cache and only 64MB RAM - apache started answering requests after a couple of seconds. Of course everything was optimized for v8 and low memory, besides that it ran ip-filters and pppoe or ISDN ( that's why I had to stick to Solaris 2.6 ). Performance wasn't stellar but certainly usable. These days the same stuff runs on a 300MHz PowerPC machine, performance is much better but startup time isn't really much shorter. 

have fun
Michael