First off, as others have pointed out you can successfully run thousands of threads, so the default 256 does not mean much. Also, HTTP pipelining is not what you think it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_pipelining
I know, I was one of those people - I just wasn't sure if Apache can do that well, I know of other servers that can. And yes, you are correct, that's what I get for posting when tired - I meant simultaneous requests!
