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  1. #1

    Question How could I optimize my server CPU load?

    Dear WHT Experts,

    I own a dedicated server and I noticed high CPU load when I have around 1000 - 1200 visitors online at the same time. Could I improve the server load via settings or should I look into the website's code?

    I have attached the TOP of my server, currently being in peak time. Also, please find below the server specs:

    Dell PowerEdge™R200
    Intel®Dual Core Xeon®E3110 3,00 GHz
    4 GB RAM
    2 x 250 GB SATA HDD
    Hardware RAID1
    Remote Management Karte
    Traffic-Flatrate
    Backup M 2.0 & Monitoring M 2.0 inkl.
    Standard Support inklusive
    Please let me know if I could help you with some other details.

    Thank you in advance for your help!
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails Clipboard01.jpg  
    Last edited by CiZsolt; 02-22-2012 at 05:19 AM.

  2. #2
    CPU isn't your only concern, you seem to be reaching the max for both ram and disk (for a good speed) as well.

    You can increase the performance of your php applications by installing things like xcache, apc, etc.
    You can make your scripts more efficient by making uses of caches
    You can decrease the need for apache to work by installing something like nginx/varnish/lighttpd/litespeed as reverse proxy to apache to serve static files or handle it in replacement of apache.

  3. #3
    Dear Grumps,

    Thank you for your answer! I use caching via smarty tpl cache, adodbe cache for database queries, but I will also check the techniques you mentioned.

    Do you think that ram and maybe disk space upgrade could be a solution to free up the resources?

  4. #4
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    There sure are a lot of apache processes there - using a lot of your resources.

    What about putting Nginx in front of apache as a reverse proxy and to serve the static content.
    CPanel Shared and Reseller Hosting, OpenVZ VPS Hosting. West Coast (LA) Servers and Nodes
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  5. #5
    Hi RRHW,

    Yes, we have always a lot of apache processes, and sometimes mysql is also on top (with 15-20%).

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by CiZsolt View Post
    Do you think that ram and maybe disk space upgrade could be a solution to free up the resources?
    I think that a CPU upgrade and some optimization is needed more than anything.

    The E3110 is some 4 years old its only a dual core and doesnt have hyper threading either...
    UK Based Proactive Server Management.
    Zabbix Enterprise 24/7 Monitoring.

  7. #7
    Join Date
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    do u have linux or windows on it ?

  8. #8
    I have a Linux dedicated server but I'm thinking about switching to the following configuration:

    CPU: 1 × AMD 8-Core
    RAM: 32 GB
    HDD: 4 × 1.000 GB
    RAID: RAID10
    I agree that the software part of the website could be optimized much more better, but I hope upgrading the hardware would do it until we manage to update/rewrite parts of the site too.

    In your opinion, is the config mentioned above good?

  9. #9
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    Apache's RAM Usage
    First and most obvious, Apache is hungry for RAM. This minor issue becomes a major when you realize that after each process has done its job, the bloated process sits and spoon-feed data to the client, instead of moving on to bigger and better things.This is further compounded by a bit of essential info that should really be
    more common knowledge:
    If you serve 100% static files with Apache, each httpd process will use around 2-3
    megs of RAM.
    If you serve 99% static files & 1% dynamic files with Apache, each httpd process will use from 3-20 megs of RAM depending on your MOST complex dynamic page.

  10. #10
    Dear dareORdie, thank you for these useful details! I serve both types of files, the static ones being cached versions of the requested content.

  11. #11
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    Feels good, thanks
    I think the following piece of info can even guide you the best way..

    Unless you have very few dynamic pages and major traffic fluctuation, most of your httpd processes will take up an amount of RAM equal to the largest dynamic script on your system. A smart web server would deal with this automatically. As it is, you have a few options to manually improve RAM usage.

    Reduce wasted processes by tweaking KeepAlive
    KeepAliveTimeout is the amount of time a process sits around doing nothing but taking up space. Those seconds add up in a HUGE way. But using KeepAlive can increase speed for both you and the client - disable KeepAlive and the serving of static files like images can be a lot slower. I think it's best to have KeepAlive on, and KeepAliveTimeout very low (like 1-2 seconds).

    Limit total processes with MaxClients
    If you use Apache to serve dynamic content, your simultaneous connections are severely limited. Exceed a certain number, and your system begins cannibalistic swapping, getting slower and slower until it dies. IMHO, a web server should automatically take steps to prevent this, but instead they seem to assume you have unlimited resources. Use trial & error to figure out how many Apache processes your server can handle, and set this value in MaxClients. Note: the Apache docs on this are misleading - if this limit is reached, clients are not "locked out", they are simply queued, and their access slows. Based on the value of MaxClients, you can estimate the values you need for StartServers, MinSpareServers, & MaxSpareServers.

    Force processes to reset with MaxRequestsPerChild
    Forcing your processes to die after a while makes them start over with low RAM usage, and this can reduce total memory usage in many situations. The less dynamic content you have, the more useful this will be. This is a game of catch-up, with your dynamic files constantly increasing total RAM usage,and restarting processes constantly reducing it. Experiment with MaxRequestsPerChild - even values as low as 20 may work well. But don't set it too low, because creating new processes does have overhead. You can figure out the best settings under load by examining "ps axu --sort:rss". A word of warning, using this is a bit like using heroin. The results can be impressive, but are NOT consistent - if the only way you can keep your server running is by tweaking this, you will eventually run into trouble. That being said, by tweaking MaxRequestsPerChild you may be able to increase MaxClients as much as 50%.

    Apache Further Tweaking
    For mixed purpose sites (say image galleries, download sites, etc.), you can often improve performance by running two different apache daemons on the same server. For example, we recently compiled apache to just serve up images (gifs,jpegs,png etc). This way for a site that has thousands of stock photos. We put both the main apache and the image apache on the same server and noticed a drop in load and ram usage. Consider a page had about 20-50 image calls -- the were all off-loaded to the stripped down apache, which could run 3x more servers with the same ram usage than the regular apache on the server.
    Finally, think outside the box: replace or supplement Apache Use a 2nd server
    You can use a tiny, lightning fast server to handle static documents & images, and pass any more complicated requests on to Apache on the same machine. This way Apache won't tie up its multi-megabyte processes serving simple streams of bytes. You can have Apache only get used, for
    example, when a php script needs to be executed. Good options for this are:

    TUX / "Red Hat Content Accelerator" - http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/tux/
    kHTTPd - http://www.fenrus.demon.nl/
    thttpd - http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/

    Try lingerd
    Lingerd takes over the job of feeding bytes to the client after Apache has fetched the document, but requires kernel modification. Sounds pretty good, haven't tried it. lingerd -

    http://www.iagora.com/about/software/lingerd/

    Use a proxy cache
    A proxy cache can keep a duplicate copy of everything it gets from Apache, and serve the copy instead of bothering Apache with it. This has the benefit of also being able to cache dynamically generated pages, but it does add a bit of bloat.

    Replace Apache completely
    If you don't need all the features of Apache, simply replace it with something more scalable.

    Currently, the best options appear to be servers that use a non-blocking I/O technology and connect to all clients with the same process. That's right - only ONE process. The best include:

    thttpd - http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/
    Caudium - http://caudium.net/index.html
    Roxen - http://www.roxen.com/products/webserver/
    Zeus ($$) - http://www.zeus.co.uk

    Solutions: PHP's CPU & RAM Usage
    Compiling PHP scripts is usually more expensive than running them. So why not use a simple tool that keeps them precompiled? I highly recommend Turck MMCache. Alternatives include PHP Accelerator, APC, & Zend Accelerator. You will see a speed increase of 2x-10x, simple as that. I have no stats on the RAM improvement at this time.

    Solutions: Optimize Database Queries
    This is covered in detail everywhere, so just keep in mind a few important notes: One bad query statement running often can bring your site to its knees. Two or three bad query statements don't perform much different than one. In other words, if you optimize one query you may not see any server-wide speed improvement. If you find & optimize ALL your bad queries you may suddenly see a 5x server speed improvement. The log-slow-queries feature of MySQL can be very helpful.

    How to log slow queries:

    # vi /etc/rc.d/init.d/mysqld

    Find this line:
    SAFE_MYSQLD_OPTIONS="--defaults-file=/etc/my.cnf"


    change it to:
    SAFE_MYSQLD_OPTIONS="--defaults-file=/etc/my.cnf --log-slow-queries=/var/log/slow-queries.log"

    As you can see, we added the option of logging all slow queries to /var/log/slow-queries.log
    Close and save mysqld. Shift + Z + Z

    touch /var/log/slow-queries.log
    chmod 644 /var/log/slow-queries.log

    restart mysql
    service myslqd restart
    mysqld will log all slow queries to this file.

    References
    These sites contain additional, more well known methods for optimization.

    Tuning Apache and PHP for Speed on Unix - http://php.weblogs.com/tuning_apache_unix
    Getting maximum performance from MySQL - http://www.f3n.de/doku/mysql/manual_10.html
    System Tuning Info for Linux Servers - http://people.redhat.com/alikins/system_tuning.html
    mod_perl Performance Tuning (applies outside perl) -

    http://perl.apache.org/docs/1.0/guide/performance.html

    Once again, if this has any errors or important omissions, you are most welcome to share.

  12. #12
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    Drop apache and replace with litespeed or nginx, optinize sql server, if you got extra cash, setup a load balancer.

  13. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by SeriesN View Post
    Drop apache and replace with litespeed or nginx, optinize sql server, if you got extra cash, setup a load balancer.
    Yes its good advice

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