Apache becomes unresponsive when serving php

Question

I'm having this strange problem on my c1.medium EC2 instance where Apache serves static files very well (as per tail -f access_log).

But, the php files don't open after a few initial requests, which are successfully fulfilled.

There are enough server resources for apache to run properly. I'm feebly experienced with Apache configuration and this is a strange problem.

Answer 1

Is it all php files? If you create a very small PHP file (i.e. "hello world" type), does it slow down too?

Dan