nginx/ seems to have done it!!! Yay, John!
Running like a champ!
nginx is nifty, undoubtedly needs configuration tweaks, basically unpacked and built in desperation. Everything else to pull the existing software out of the toilet failed. No idea why Apache just up and barfed on the job. Very frustrating to have such poor performance without being load bound. The path that bypassed the front-end was responsive, the path that went through the front-end was dead (with near zero cpu/disk/net load across the board.)