[ ... ]
Now I observed, that it takes a long time to change the onwership of the processes, which I set via the 'user' and 'grou' derictives in httpd.conf. After the ownership changed, the processes serve immediately the requests.
I am not sure how you have observed this, but my suspiction is you are observing a side-effect of the delay, not the cause of the delay itself. One possibility is that your configuration requires a large number of DNS resolutions; others have suggested other possibilities.
Apart from educated guessing, I unfortunately don't know of a better way to debug this than to comment out parts of the configuration to see what is causing the delay. I suspect if you start with a minimal configuration you will find that the process user and group are changed very quickly.
Did anybody observe something simular and has an idea what might cause this long delay in changing the ownership? Is it possible to to debug the startup phase of the apache, to see were the processes spend their time?
A tool to debug this would be extremely useful, but unfortunately I'm not aware of any.
-----Scott.
