Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Suggestion on Server Settings

[water12345]

Good day everyone,

We run a local TV station in Gutt/Sweden and host our archive on the net for people to download. Each show is about an hour and the files are 300MB or less (wmv format). Here are the server specifications:

Line: 100mbps (Unmetered)
Dual Xeon 3.0GHz
1 GB of Ram
CentOs (uname -a: 2.6.9-34.ELsmp #1 SMP Wed Mar 8 00:27:03 CST 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux)

Here are some of the settings in httpd.conf:

Timeout 30
KeepAlive Off
MaxKeepAliveRequests 0
KeepAliveTimeout 5
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 10
StartServers 5
MaxClients 550
MaxRequestsPerChild 0

As it can be seen, max client is set too 550 (also set to 550 in httpd.h -> hard_server_limit ), however, once the number of connections exceed ~250 or so, it takes a long time for a new download to start. For example, suppose there are 250 ESTABLISHED connections on port 80, and I try to download one of the shows myself, I will have to wait for at least 5 minutes for the download to start.

To summarize my inquiry, as it was said ealier, we host relatively large files and have them on http (apache) on our website for people to download, and we believe we have a decent server with a very good connection (100mbit), however this does not sattisfy the visitors as it sometimes take a long time for them to start download.

Any suggestions is greatly appreciated.

Thank You

-Dave

[Jedito]

what version of Apache are you running?

[water12345]

I used to be on 2.2.2, I downgraded it to:

Server version: Apache/1.3.35


The reason I downgraded was because I thought it might be the solution.

Thanks

[Jedito]

Sorry for my stupid question, but did you recompiled apache from the source after edit httpd.h ?

[water12345]

yes I did.

[tulix]

Probably will be helpful if you'll post network utilization (%?), disk drive utilization and CPU/Memory utlization. There are only several bottlenecks - you have to find out which one is 100% utilized. We have much larger systems running without problems while CPUs are not as powerful as yours. Before you'll send any info - I would start with network (including % of errors) , then drive subsystem (you can use iostat package - yum it for CentOS), then Memory.

[ImZan]

If you have 250+ people downloading mostly video content, you will run into IO problems with apache. Go back to Apache 2.2, and try to configure and use the caching modules. Also - make sure you have the DMA enabled, and that the cable you're using for the HDD - if ATA - is 133 rated - not the cheap 33/66 type. Try changing the min / max servers values to 16/32 or 32/64. This helps with loaded servers which need a lot of capacity ramped up and available - also using a specific seperate server to serve the videos would yield better results. Try using a stripped down Apache or light webserver as well.