Apache processes running for 30 minutes ?.....
My advice : use frames and Javascript !
In your webpage, you have two frames : "content" and "refresh".
"content" starts empty (say, just a title on top of the page).
"refresh" is refreshed every five seconds from a script on your server.
This script generates a javascript which "document.write()'s" new entries
in the "content" frame, thus adding new records in the upper frame.
Thus, the refreshing uses a new request every 5 seconds, which terminates
very fast, and does not hog an Apache process.
Turn keepalive timeout down.
