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.
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.
If you don't need KeepAlives, (like for mostly dynamic output and few images or a seperate image server), you should check out lingerd: http://www.iagora.com/about/software/lingerd/.
On my site, which was running at the time with something like 85 concurrent apache processes to keep up with the requests, I turned on lingerd and the number of processes running dropped to 10-12. (saved us upgrading the box for another year :). The memory usage and load average dropped accordingly, but naturally YMMV.
L8r, Rob
