Re: [BENCHMARK] Server Resources

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My first suggestion based on a migration the company I work for did
not too long ago would be to use apache2 in thread mode.  There was a
staggering drop in system memory resources consumed when we made the
shift - from most of a gigabyte to only a few hundred megs!   The
site's response speed picked up too.

Also, to compare, I work with an apache 1.3 site that has alot of cgi
perl script on it.  With the idea that shifting to mod_perl registry
mode would cause this site to go faster, I modified the configuration.
 And watched the system load average rapidly climb into the
multiple-hundreds!  Its a tilt of the hat to BSD that it didn't crash
right there.  But I was able to kill apache (-9 -9 -9!!) and restore
the cgi scripts to normal mod_cgi handling.  What happened?  Memory
usage.  Each copy of the apache had those big cgi scripts loaded in. 
And this very busy server had ALOT of processes running
simultaneously.

To summarize - apache2 with threads may solve the problem - shifting
to cgi mode for the perl scripts may solve the problem.

Limiting the number of simultaneous apaches will help - but will slow
down the site.

But thats about the extent of what I can say, I defer to any other
more expert perl ghods on the list who may have more intelligent
comments.  :)

Skylos

On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 13:43:44 -0700 (MST), sofadmin@xxxxxxx.xxx
<sofadmin@xxxxxxx.xxx> wrote:
> First let me apologize if this is not the appropriate forum for my question.
> I thought it would be because the issue has to do with
> apache/modperl/mysql performance.
> 
> We have recently added a site to our server which hosts 30 other sites.
> The new site uses modperl & MySQL. After adding the new site, the server
> we were on (shared server at a national server farm) had major resource
> problems (too many connections & load avg up to 30 not infrequently) &
> eventually crashed. We moved to a new dedicated server which gave us more
> resources, but we're still experiencing intermittent sluggishness - load
> avg approaching 10 - and this is before this new site really becomes
> active. Maybe 20 logins per day currently - in 10 days we'll have ~ 4000.
> 
> I've made changes to Apache config, following suggestions in the mod_perl
> performance tuning docs:
> MinSpareServers 5
> MaxSpareServers 10
> MaxClients=75
> MaxRequestsPerChild 500
> 
> I've made efforts to optimize the database & queries, and have made
> changes to the my.cnf file following suggestions in the High Performance
> MySQL O'Reilly book & a couple of postings that seemed to have some
> similarity to our situation:
> set-variable = key_buffer_size=128M
> set-variable = table_cache=1024
> set-variable = join_buffer=1M
> set-variable = sort_buffer=2M
> set-variable = record_buffer=1M
> set-variable = wait_timeout=20
> set-variable = thread_cache=8
> 
> But before I go any further with testing & modifying configurations &
> perhaps code, I'd like to have some good idea that the server we currently
> are running on should be able to handle this new site & the 30 others - 2
> running WebGUI, 12 use MySQL (4-5 fairly heavily), 4 modperl.
> 
> The server is a Pentium 3 800 MHz with 768M RAM (of which we can use ~640,
> according to the server sysadmin)
> 
> It's running Ensim 4.0 with Fedora Core 1 with Embedded Perl version
> v5.8.1 for Apache/1.3.31 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_perl/1.29 PHP/4.3.8
> FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_ssl/2.8.18 OpenSSL/0.9.7a
> MySQL version 3.23.58
> 
> Any constructive suggestions are very welcome.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Sys
> 
>