On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 7:53 AM, sjt5atra sjt5atra@gmail.com wrote:
Others have mentioned tuning httpd.conf parameters. Problem is apache doesn't give you the math to know what to set those without lots of trial-and-error. The best guide for this math is from F5: http://www.f5.com/pdf/deployment-guides/f5-apache-dg.pdf
Indeed, there's a bit of voodoo involved... And goats.
In the past I've used webalizer logs to get an idea of the peak number of hits per minute. This works fine for certain types of accesses. For monitoring memory usage, I've used top in batch mode to grab the actual process memory usage. If the memory usage grows quickly and there are many spare httpd processes then the sum of these numbers will climb rapidly. In this case, tuning down the number of httpd processes and/or cycling them sooner can help. I've found that performance is not measurably affected in my workloads but mileage varies widely.