Topic: Threads are going crazy on Windows

[comert]

We have a windows install of apache 2.4.4 (WIN64)and it has been running for some time now with very few issues and periodically there are very heavy loads. However last week during a heavy load we noticed that things were timing out and objects on the page were not always displaying. We noticed that we were running out of threads so we increased the threads per child from 4500 to 5500 then restarted apache. When I did this it immediately used all 5500 threads and in the logs said all were used and I should consider increasing them, I kept increasing the threads and getting the same results, no matter how high I put the threads it used them all and we know that the load was not that high. We added resources to our VM server and rebooted it and that did not fix the problem either. The next day our VM actually migrated to another host and the problem resolved itself. What I need to know is what would cause Apache to continually use all of its threads?