Site's slow to connect

[Dave]

Don't forget that it's just the condition that is applied because the socket path will be different.

I don't understand any of it Chen it's way above my comprehension, all I was doing was trying to see if the link you posted was what I found   

[Skhilled]

Sorry that I haven't respond to this but I've been VERY busy! When I logged in today everything was OK.

[Chen Zhen]

The site has been fine since the configuration was changed.

Basically a script (or scripts) were hammering the server with bogus file searches. Since PHP was previously handling the file not found errors, it was spiking resource usage (ie. memory + CPU). Apache now handles the error which uses very little resources, rendering that sort of attack ineffective.