How to make Apache (2.2.4) less greedy, or Sendmail less polite?

[[LoN]Kamikaze]

Olaf Greve wrote:
> PS: This morning (and some of the other past few days as well) I took a
> closer look to the server loads, and it looks like during the better
> part of the morning the load is virtually 0%, and around midday (or
> slighlty before?), all of a sudden Apache starts going crazy and
> receives very heavy load. I wonder if this can perhaps be some DOS
> attack, and hence I'd like to see what each of the stressed daemon
> instances is doing exactly...

It might as well be a search engine spider.