289965 Apache Optimization for Proxy

I run a fairly large proxy server website (phproxy) that gets about 3-8K visitors daily. My apache seems to constantly need to be restarted due to so many open pid's. Is there a way to optimize this so that unused slots are closed up quicker or something? I had an old server that someone optimized for me with lower specs that I never had this problem with. I just recently switched hosts. Thanks