Apache Performance Tweaks Needed

toma42

Hopefully all those I've helped before can help me now...I'm calling in favors 🙂

A web site I created for a client is on the front page of salon.com and the server is getting slammed.

Will you please post ideas for performance enhancements for apache under linux here? I'm currently going with a basic install with no tweaks.

Thanks!
Tom

smarlowe

First, make sure reverse lookups are off.

Compile PHP with inline optimizations switch.

Up the max number of child processes for apache. Note that going over 256 requires both plenty of memory and recompilation with an edit of a header file I believe.

I'm sure I'm missing some.

Anon

Also install the zend optimizer if you have not done so already. www.zend.com.

brandonschnell

1) let proxy servers cache docs. by default some apache configs will send pragma: no-cache with every document. uncomment out the line that says "CacheNegotiatedDocs"

2) decrease the timeout value in apache

3) like scott said, up startservers and min & max spareservers

4) zend cache might also be usefull.

brandonschnell

even better yet, a link:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/perf-tuning.html

smarlowe

And of course, there's always Apache 2.0beta, which is closer to being "production quality" than IIS is.

[deleted]

Does PHP already support Apache 2?

Anon

Hi Tom!
Maybe i'm offtopic ...
If you have bandwidth problems too, I think u can try the mod_gzip compression module at remotecommunications.com.
Now I can't tell you something like: "my god it rocks! use it", or, "it's buggy, don't think to try it!".

Reading the forum at http://lists.over.net/pipermail/mod_gzip/, it seems that there are some problem yet, like page corruption providing dynamic contents. I use mod_gzip since version 1.3.14 and i never had problems ...

Hope this can help you a little!
ciao .. Paolo

toma42

My understanding is that it does not support Apache 2 yet.

vincentpeace

But won't mod_gzip just increase the load on the server? What is the problem here, bandwidth or server performance?

toma42

Server performance. The postgresql server is taking a lot of the CPU...I've optimized that as much as I could and wanted to get ideas on decreasing cpu use for Apache.

Thanks

vincentpeace

Maybe you should look at using squid (proxy caching server) to reduce the load on apache for non-dynamic requests. What sort of thing is the server doing?

toma42

This is for http://www.strangerinyourbed.com (a contract project, not my idea, insert another excuse here)

The main page is and must be dynamic. I'm using shared memory to make is faster but I still have to query the database to get random images (the image path only is stored in the db).

Anon

Hi!
After a lot of web searches ...

Accelerating Apache
URL: http://oss.sgi.com/projects/apache/
The Accelerating Apache project is SGI's effort to increase the performance of the open source Apache HTTP Server. The project produces patches for application to an Apache source tree and contributes them to the Apache
Software Foundation in the hope that the ASF will adopt them into a future Apache release.

This project's aggressive optimizations make Apache/1.3 up to ten times faster and Apache/2.0 up to four times faster on the SPECweb96b enchmark. Current work focuses on porting the patches for 1.3 to 2.0 and on tuning for the
SPECweb99 benchmark.

.... i don't know, ... maybe it's a good work!
lemme know! bye

smarlowe

Mandrake includes these patches for you if you use their version of apache that comes with their distro.