I'm trying everything I can think of :/
First thought was that maybe it's php or mysql, but it wasn't. It was apache just consuming memory and hangs or runaway processes.
Turned ExtendedStatus on to try and pinpoint what pages the excessive memory processes were using. All were hitting a pretty simple php page.
There were several different ones, and each seemed to be hooked to that same page and each process this time ( about 6 of them ) were at about 150M or more each.
This is the ip # of the remote agent
66.147.154.3
and the useragent was this:
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/crawler/
What I'm wondering is why doesn't apache KILL the damn things when there's no memory left or they've hung for such a long time ?