From: w...@whistlingfish.net
Subject: Need help with performance
Date: 1999/03/11
Message-ID: <7c7j0o$5ts$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>#1/1
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Hi Everybody,
We're considering using Linux + Apache as a web server. The hardware
is a 4-processor 400 MHz (Xeon) server with 1GB of ram, a RAID controller,
and six disks. We have Redhat 5.2 installed and compiled an SMP version
of the 2.2.2 Linux kernel. For the web server we used the latest 2.0.3
version of Apache.
The scenario: we're bangin' on this web server with a bunch of clients
to try and get a handle on its capacity. Simple static HTML requests,
no heavy CGI yet.
The problem: the server performs well, delivering in excess of 1300
HTTP GET requests per second. But then performance just drops WAAAY
off, like down to 70 connections per second. We're not swapping,
the network isn't saturated (4 x 100Mbit nets), disks are hardly used,
but the system is just crawling. Neither vmstat nor top show anything
unusual. No error messages in the web server. Its puzzling.
Any ideas? Any tips, suggestions, or pointers would be appreciated.
Thanks!
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From: w...@whistlingfish.net
Subject: Performance help request...
Date: 1999/03/11
Message-ID: <7c7j9v$69k$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>#1/1
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Hi Everybody,
We're considering using Linux + Apache as a web server. The hardware
is a 4-processor 400 MHz (Xeon) server with 1GB of ram, a RAID controller,
and six disks. We have Redhat 5.2 installed and compiled an SMP version
of the 2.2.2 Linux kernel. For the web server we used the latest 2.0.3
version of Apache.
The scenario: we're bangin' on this web server with a bunch of clients
to try and get a handle on its capacity. Simple static HTML requests,
no heavy CGI yet. My Apache server is tuned up, MaxClients is 460.
I recompiled with HARD_SERVER_LIMIT set to 500. Limit on number of
processes is 512, imit on file descriptors is 1024.
The problem: the server performs well, delivering in excess of 1300
HTTP GET requests per second. But then performance drops WAAAY
off, like down to 70 connections per second. We're not swapping,
the network isn't saturated (4 x 100Mbit nets), disks are hardly used,
but the system is just crawling. If it were saturated then performance
should level off, not drop like this. Neither vmstat nor top show
anything unusual. No error messages in the web server. Its puzzling.
Any ideas? Any tips, suggestions, or pointers would be appreciated.
Thanks!
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From: wclark_x...@my-dejanews.com
Subject: Re: Need help with performance
Date: 1999/03/11
Message-ID: <7c97vp$ke7$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>#1/1
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In article <7c7j0o$5t...@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
w...@whistlingfish.net wrote:
> We're considering using Linux + Apache as a web server.
Excellent choice.
> The hardware is a 4-processor 400 MHz (Xeon) server with 1GB of ram, a RAID
> controller, and six disks. We have Redhat 5.2 installed and compiled an SMP
> version of the 2.2.2 Linux kernel.
I hope it's not too late to change your hardware, because your box is a
complete waste of money. SMP gives you *nothing* with regards to web
serving, and it makes your OS flaky as all hell. The RAM is nice, but the
processor speed is overkill and having 4 of them is just plain wasteful. The
network card would saturate completely before you even came remotely close to
using up the resources of even a single P2 200Mhz.
> For the web server we used the latest 2.0.3 version of Apache.
Stick with what works. I'd use 1.3.4, as it's generally considered more
'stable'. You don't *always* want to be "bleeding edge".
> The scenario: we're bangin' on this web server with a bunch of clients
> to try and get a handle on its capacity. Simple static HTML requests,
> no heavy CGI yet.
Another suggestion: mod_php3. I guarantee that if you ever see large
amounts of traffic, CGI will rapidly become your worst nightmare. There are
a variety of _internal_ Apache modules that give you everthing CGI can do,
but faster better and more efficiently. Keep in mind that CGI requires you
to fork() another process to handle each web request, which can very quickly
run you up against the process limit on a heavily loaded machine. PHP3 is a
PERL-like, C-like programming language that's relatively lightweight. You
can download the sources from http://www.php.net/, where they also provide
instructions on how to build it into Apache.
> The problem: the server performs well, delivering in excess of 1300
> HTTP GET requests per second. But then performance just drops WAAAY
> off, like down to 70 connections per second. We're not swapping,
> the network isn't saturated (4 x 100Mbit nets), disks are hardly used,
> but the system is just crawling. Neither vmstat nor top show anything
> unusual. No error messages in the web server. Its puzzling.
Try various flags to netstat, see what they say. If you could post the
details of several different commands that would be helpful in diagnosing the
problem.
> Any ideas? Any tips, suggestions, or pointers would be appreciated.
> Thanks!
What type of network load do you expect to see on your box in the long run?
What type of applications does it need to run (other than Apache and its
modules)? I know it's blasphemy in this group, but if you're just doing "raw"
webserving (no database interaction) you'd see *much* better performance with
some variant of BSD (for example, FreeBSD from http://www.freebsd.org). If
you're more into running a K-rAd k00l website with lots of doo-dads and gizmos
(and don't care about performance under heavy load), then Linux is your best
bet.
-Bill Clark
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From: Jef Poskanzer <j...@acme.com>
Subject: Re: Performance help request...
Date: 1999/03/11
Message-ID: <7c8tq3$ssr$1@shell3.ba.best.com>#1/1
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Organization: ACME Laboratories
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w...@whistlingfish.net:
}We're considering using Linux
Try switching to FreeBSD 3.0. Seriously.
---
Jef
Jef Poskanzer j...@acme.com http://www.acme.com/jef/
We accept food stamps.