My web site is gaining popularity quickly, but I can’t afford to upgrade my hardware. What can I do to optimize Apache?
With the explosion of Internet use and its attendant traffic, keeping pace with rising demand is a common problem. Luckily, there are some concrete steps you can take to relieve system stress.
As with all performance problems, your first action should be to identify and ease bottlenecks. Use tools such as top, vmstat, and iostat to diagnose your system. Also, consider what kinds of content you are serving: if you use CGI, scripting, databases, or other tools to generate and serve dynamic content, analyze and optimize each of those subsystems, too.
Focus next on hardware. Lots of RAM is essential for smooth Apache performance — you must have enough memory to avoid hitting swap. If you serve static content, raw CPU power shouldn’t be a concern. However, if you serve dynamic content, the more processing power, the better. Also, make sure you have fairly fast disks, and, of course, enough network bandwidth.
There are also many ways to improve Apache’s own performance. In Apache’s configuration file, httpd.conf, it’s important that you disable HostnameLookups. If left on, Apache waits for a DNS response before completing each and every request. (If you want to use reverse lookups to collect statistics, you can easily derive them after the log’s been rotated. In fact, many log analysis programs even have this built-in.)
Whenever possible, enable FollowSymLinks and disable…
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