Synopsis: First httpd process seems to die.... State-Changed-From-To: open-closed State-Changed-By: marc State-Changed-When: Tue Jul 7 12:36:30 PDT 1998 State-Changed-Why: That is expected and normal, and is the way that nearly all daemons behave on Unix and is, in fact, part of the meaning of daemon.
There is no way to prevent that in Apache, however you could just read the pid of the parent from the pid file (ie. httpd.pid) and us ethat.
