There's also just tossing a reverse proxy in front of your apache, it hands the problem of slow requests, bad requests, KeepComatose, etc to something lightweight that's a lot more crap-tolerant.

http://joshua.schachter.org/2008/01/proxy.html

The simpler of these (e.g. pound) take about as much time to set up as scrolling through your apache config looking for some mis-set option.