Apache Novice

[dbnex14]

I am new to Apache and we are using Apache 2.2 and have a situation where Apache will stop responding for couple of seconds every once in a while a few times a day. There is nothing else on this machine, just the Apache server serving requests coming only from devices, nothing else.

I wonder if this is caused by some kind of Apache threshold being reached and when that happens, Apache will stop responding for couple of seconds until new requests can be processed. Problem is that if devices send request at that time, they will timeout.

Apache is serving requests from bar-code scanning devices which scan items in a warehouse. It could be 1-50 or so devices doing scans at any time. All scans will update item location in database and Apache server is the middle man between devices and database. The requests from devices are sent asynchronously, so a device will not wait for a result of a scan, but it can be just pointed to another item to scan it. So, a device could send say 2-4 request per second, the more devices, the more requests.

What settings should I be looking at, how to set them, and where?