Re: [BENCHMARK] Server Resources

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On Fri, 2005-01-14 at 13:08 -0800, Skylos wrote:
> 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.

No offense, but I think there may be some other reason for that.  All
reports so far say that running in threaded mode uses significantly more
memory than pre-fork because it defeats the copy-on-write sharing.

> 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!

That's probably because you didn't tune the server settings for the
increased memory needed by mod_perl.  When you run mod_perl, you have to
adjust your MaxClients setting and use something like Apache::SizeLimit
to limit the size of processes.  This keeps you from going over the
available RAM.  A good setup for a site that has some legacy CGI to run
as well is to make the CGI server run mod_proxy and proxy the mod_perl
requests back to a separate server that just runs mod_perl.  Running a
small number of mod_perl processes will still give you better
performance than a large number of CGI processes because the speed gains
are so large.

- Perrin