The crash report doesn't mean much (at least to us).
I can't think of anything CP related. Beside the test we made on a the 'very humble' server of ours, we know of websites with literally thousands of tags and thousands of articles running smoothly.
Also, if CP made Apache crash under a load so light (40 articles is 20 tags is aproximately the configuration of our public demo sites), I bet we had customers with pitchforks and torches at the door.
The following are a couple of server config. The top one is a Windows server with Apache 2.2.2 and runs the thousands articles - thousands tags site.