Late yesterday I re-enabled everything on the site, including status display code, so everyone should be seeing their actual Ecosystem level on their blogs again. At this point, I still have not been able to isolate why I see Apache child processes exploding in memory size.
But, I have a cron job running that checks every minute to see if one has, and restarts Apache if needed. So the end result is the problem is masked, but not solved. So, assistance is still welcome; see this post for the full details of the problem…