I have a website which does convertion of pdfs to word docs. My server is 8GB Quad-Core Opteron.
A conversion can take between 1 seconds for a small pdf file (eg 35kb) to 60 seconds (for pdf files of 5Mb).
I have about 10 requests for conversions per minute with medium files size of pdf being about 1-2 Mb.
I know that for web apps which depends on CPU high usage it's better to have multiple worker processes so I put 5 being maximum. (so a user does not have to wait for others to finish their conversion but can have a process opened for it). I also put PrivateMemoryLimit being about 1GB. Also Request Limit is 500 (to have it recycled from time to time).
Well, sometimes the CPU goes 90-100% or memory goes 70-90%.
Do you have any better configuration proposals for such cases?