Leave all the users suspended, and then stop apache from the service monitor. If it hasn't started itself within a minute, restart it from the service monitor.
Then wait about ten minutes. Then what does the service monitor show?
If it's not back to normal, then force apache to stop from the command line as root:
.
Then again, wait a minute and if it hasn't restarted itself, restart it from the service manager.
Then check the service monitor again after ten minutes. If it's gone back to a lot of processes, then someone is attacking your server from it's main IP#.
If monitor shows a low number, start unsuspending your users, while watching the service monitor, to see which one is causing the problem. (Of course you may have fixed it just by restarting apache.)
Jeff