Tuning Your Hardware


vmstat


Likely, the single most important action that you can take to improve the performance of your server is to increase the amount of RAM. That extra RAM will allow the operating system to cache frequently accessed disk files, as well as to support multiple Apache children running simultaneously.

The second aspect to consider is disk speed. Fast disks with large amounts of onboard cache can significantly improve the load. You may also want to modify different drive parameters, such as enabling Direct Memory Access support for your drive. Under Linux, you can achieve this with the hdparm utility.

vmstat is a useful Unix tool for finding bottlenecks. This tool reports information about processes, memory, paging, block IO, traps, and CPU activity.

If you are using SSL in your server and need to support many simultaneous users, that can require a lot of CPU resources. A faster processor or a dedicated crypto card will help in this situation. Please refer to Chapter 7 and to the improving SSL performance section in Chapter 10 for additional settings that can help. Finally, machines with multiple CPUs and/or multicore CPUs greatly increase the scalability of process-based web servers and are recommended for medium- and heavy-duty hosting.




Apache(c) Phrase Book(c) Essential Code and Commands
Apache Phrasebook
ISBN: 0672328364
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 254

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