Apache2 + Mysql ab bencharmk 4 requests per second

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Hi,

It's official. I have the worse apache2 + php + mysql ever running on Ubuntu server 10.04LTS 64x.
Dual CPU Xeon 3,2 dual core = 8 cores
3GB RAM
800GB SAS

My best benchmar using apachebench is:
ab -n 500 -c 20 http://www.example.com/

Code:

Server Software:        Apache/2.2.14
Server Hostname:        www.example.com
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        20590 bytes

Concurrency Level:      90
Time taken for tests:   231.692 seconds
Complete requests:      1000
Failed requests:        106
   (Connect: 0, Receive: 0, Length: 106, Exceptions: 0)
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      18923080 bytes
HTML transferred:       18410852 bytes
Requests per second:    4.32 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       20852.285 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       231.692 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          79.76 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.8      0       3
Processing:    99 20433 8935.3  21352   44022
Waiting:       99 19119 8354.0  20284   42850
Total:         99 20433 8935.3  21352   44022

By now I bench marked pretty much all hardware faults:
Processor 8x Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.20GHz
Memory 3090MB (799MB used)
Operating System Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS
CPU Bench using hardinfo:

Code:

CPU Blowfish
This Machine	3192 MHz	3.450
CPU CryptoHash
This Machine	3192 MHz	369.540

Hard Drive Bench using hdparm -t /dev/sda

Code:

/dev/sda:
 Timing buffered disk reads:  780 MB in  3.01 seconds = 259.42 MB/sec

So...that leaves me with software configuration.
apache2.conf

Code:

TimeOut 300
KeepAlive on
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
KeepAliveTimeout 5
<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
    StartServers          5
    MinSpareServers       5
    MaxSpareServers      10
    MaxClients          150
    MaxRequestsPerChild   0
</IfModule>
<IfModule mpm_worker_module>
    StartServers          2
    MaxClients          150
    MinSpareThreads      25
    MaxSpareThreads      75
    ThreadsPerChild      25
    MaxRequestsPerChild   0
</IfModule>

I tested running apache2 with startservers8,4 but results got worse, so the default seems to work best.
Also I disabled all logging in apache2.conf and the virtualhosts, getting desperate 

MYSQL, my.conf

Code:

[client]
port            = 3306
socket          = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock


[mysqld_safe]
socket          = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
nice            = 0

[mysqld]
#skip-innodb
skip-name-resolve
# END SKIPPING THINGS
user            = mysql
socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
port = 3306
basedir         = /usr
datadir = /var/lib/mysql
tmpdir          = /tmp
skip-external-locking
bind-address = 127.0.0.1
key_buffer              = 64M
max_allowed_packet      = 16M
thread_stack            = 192K
thread_cache_size       = 64
myisam-recover          = BACKUP
query_cache_limit       = 64M
query_cache_size        = 128M
query_cache_type        = 1
join_buffer_size        = 512K
max_connections         = 90
log_error               = /var/log/mysql/error.log
#log_slow_queries        = /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log
expire_logs_days        = 2
max_binlog_size         = 100M
# Try number of CPU's*2 for thread_concurrency
#thread_concurrency     = 4
wait_timeout            = 10

[mysqldump]
quick
quote-names
max_allowed_packet      = 16M

[mysql]


[isamchk]
key_buffer              = 16M
#key_buffer = 150M
#sort_buffer = 64M
#read_buffer = 16M
#write_buffer = 16M

[myisamchk]
#key_buffer = 150M
#sort_buffer = 64M
#read_buffer = 16M
#write_buffer = 16M
!includedir /etc/mysql/conf.d/

I tested the memory and swap for the key_buffer, right now is set to 64M, but i also tested with 16M, 32M and 128M.
64M and 128M seems to provide the best results... but still extremely low:
Requests per second: 4.40 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 4.69 [#/sec] (mean) WOW my best result ever?!?! 

Also removed all dns queries from apache2 and mysql, so it does not take time to resolve hostnames, IP based only.

Tested DNS (pointed at google DNS), tested the network card, seems normal.

I'm out of ideas?!
p.s. Sorry for the long post.