My host has me over a barrel.  I've placed myself in a pickle. How to handle?
patrickg-zill: Well the first you can do, is to configure apache to restart an httpd process after serving some number of clients.  Under Apache 2.x this is called MaxRequestsPerChild and the default is 10000 requests.  Since you are not bumping into CPU problems, try reducing this number to say 500 requests.  After a child process has served 500 requests it will exit, and another process will be started.