Slow response and hangs

hey i am handling a small application,

it is running well. but very rarely it hangs... (i.e) loggin page itself will take more than 10m and the response will be very very slow.

config:

tomcat 4.1 (10g oracle jar)
oracle 9i
apache 2.0.46


logs
------
no error in the application log and in the catalina log.

in apache error log we have


[Thu Oct 11 07:42:11 2007] [warn] child process 27327 still did not exit, sending a SIGTERM
[Thu Oct 11 07:42:11 2007] [warn] child process 26887 still did not exit, sending a SIGTERM
[Thu Oct 11 07:42:11 2007] [warn] child process 16552 still did not exit, sending a SIGTERM
[Thu Oct 11 07:42:11 2007] [warn] child process 6869 still did not exit, sending a SIGTERM
[Thu Oct 11 07:42:11 2007] [warn] child process 8749 still did not exit, sending a SIGTERM
[Thu Oct 11 07:42:11 2007] [warn] child process 1256 still did not exit, sending a SIGTERM
[Thu Oct 11 07:42:11 2007] [warn] child process 27002 still did not exit, sending a SIGTERM
[Thu Oct 11 07:42:11 2007] [warn] child process 27148 still did not exit, sending a SIGTERM
[Thu Oct 11 07:42:11 2007] [warn] child process 26890 still did not exit, sending a SIGTERM
[Thu Oct 11 07:42:11 2007] [warn] child process 6914 still did not exit, sending a SIGTERM
[Thu Oct 11 07:42:11 2007] [warn] child process 8775 still did not exit, sending a SIGTERM
[Thu Oct 11 07:42:11 2007] [warn] child process 26891 still did not exit, sending a SIGTERM

when this happens it hangs....

and then during that time the number of http connections were also increasing....
we suppose it is not getting closed (i.e) number of TIME_WAIT keep on increasing...at certain stage it couldnt handle and so it hangs.

other than that every thing is fine....

we could able to ping and all those stuffs.....

What is the parameter that needs to be altered........ .

is there anything to do with


<ContextParam >
<param-name>timeBetwee nEvictionRunsMi llis</param-name>
<param-value>1000</param-value>
</ContextParam>
<ContextParam >
<param-name>minEvictab leIdleTimeMilli s</param-name>
<param-value>36000000</param-value>
</ContextParam>

this is going on for quite some time.. i am clueless. can some one put some light on it........