1. Apache Performance Tuning Part 1: Scaling Up Sander Temme

2. 2 “Apache is a general webserver, which is designed to be correct first, and fast second. Even so, its performance is quite satisfactory. Most sites have less than 10Mbits of outgoing bandwidth, which Apache can fill using only a low end Pentium-based webserver.” http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/misc/perf-tuning.html says:

3. 3

4. 4 Goals of Performance Tuning Serve as Many Requests as Possible Graceful Degradation (Don’t crash the box)

5. 5 Assumptions Limited Resources Work With What You Have You’re probably running Linux No Compiling or Recompiling! You can find httpd.conf

6. 6 Monitoring Your Server

7. 7 Purposes of Monitoring Observation Extrapolation Signals/Alerts Testing

8. 8 Monitoring Apache

9. 9 Monitoring Solaris: SE Toolkit Lightweight Programmable Alive http://www.sunfreeware.com/setoolkit.html

10. 10 Other Monitoring Tools vmstat iostat top free

11. 11

12. 12 Web Server Logs ErrorLog LogLevel: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit Access Log: TransferLog or CustomLog Common Log Format

13. 13 Common Log Format 172.16.2.91 - - [16/Nov/2003:15:23:27 -0800] "GET /~sctemme/ HTTP/1.1" 200 1446 172.16.2.91 - - [16/Nov/2003:15:23:28 -0800] "GET /~sctemme/css/doc.css HTTP/1.1" 200 167 172.16.2.91 - - [16/Nov/2003:15:23:28 -0800] "GET /~sctemme/css/menu.css HTTP/1.1" 200 623 172.16.2.91 - - [16/Nov/2003:15:23:29 -0800] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 283 172.16.2.91 - - [16/Nov/2003:15:23:34 -0800] "GET /~sctemme/index.html HTTP/1.1" 200 1446 Client IP172.16.2.91 RFC 1413 ident- username- timestamp[16/Nov/2003:15:23:29 -0800] Request"GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" Status Code404 Content Bytes283

14. 14 Configuring for Performance Configuring Apache Tuning the Operating System

15. 15 Apache Configuration Process/Thread Management DNS Lookups Avoid.htaccess Files Disable unused modules Tune your App Tier

16. 16 DNS Lookups HostnameLookups Access Control Bad: Deny from example.com Good: Deny from 172.160.234.5

17. 17.htaccess Files Per-directory configuration files Accessed for every request Best performance: AllowOverride none GET /dir1/dir2/restricted.html HTTP/1.0

18. 18 MaxClients Configuration file directive Maximum number of workers Apache 1.3, 2.0 Prefork: processes Apache 2.0 Worker: threads * processes Limit according to resources (memory)

19. 19 Server-side Includes We Love Them! Easy to implement Easy to manage We Hate Them! They break sendfile() They break cacheability

20. 20 SSI on www.apache.org SSI Enabled

21. 21 Sizing MaxClients Take total RAM Subtract OS allowance look at free value without Apache, etc. Subtract external program allowance JVM, cgi programs, MySQL? Divide by httpd process size Read process size from top

22. 22 Top

23. 23 Selecting Your MPM Apache 2.0 only! Processes and Threads Differences between platforms Thread-safety issues

24. 24 Processes and Threads Process: Own copy of data structures Shares: program code, shared memory Context switches expensive Thread: Runs within process Shares process environment No context switch

25. 25 Platforms and Threading Context switches expensive on Solaris, AIX Context switches cheaper on Linux Solaris uses M:N threading Linux uses 1 process per thread LinuxThreads implementation is old Replaced by Native Posix Thread Library (NPTL) in 2.6 NTPL already in RH 9, RHAS 3

26. 26 Thread-safety Third-party modules and libraries mod_perl: experimental threading in Perl 5.6; more mature in Perl 5.8 PHP: uses many third-party libraries FreeBSD: threading not reliable until 5.x Apache 2.2 Worker MPM runs on FreeBSD

27. 27 Tune your App Tier Tomcat Edit server.xml, tune minProcessors, maxProcessors Use APR -> Persistent connections Tune JVM (Heap, Garbage Collection) MySQL Ships with various scenarios in support-files: my-{small,medium,large,huge}.conf PHP & prefork: every child makes a connection Tune max_connections variable in my.cnf

28. 28 System Tuning Tips RAM and swap space ulimit: files and processes Turn off unused services and modules

29. 29 RAM and Swap Swap is disk-based Extension of RAM Excessive swapping kills performance Tune MaxClients Never have more memory than swap Upgrade RAM -> add more swap space

30. 30 ulimit Per-process resource limits Built-in command of sh, bash Important limits: processes (-u) open files (-n) Set in invoking shell Code in Apache 2.0 startup script ulimit -S -n `ulimit -H -n` Linux: /etc/security/limits.conf

31. 31 Caching Content Dynamic Content is Expensive Static Content Relatively Cheap Several Approaches: Dynamic caching Pre-rendering popular pages (index.rss…)

32. 32 mod_cache Configuration CacheRoot /raid1/cacheroot CacheEnable disk / # A page modified 100 min. ago will expire in 10 min. CacheLastModifiedFactor.1 # Always check again after 6 hours CacheMaxExpire 21600

33. 33 Make Popular Pages Static RSS Feeds Popular catalog queries … (Check your access log)

34. 34 Static Page Substitution Options +Indexes Order allow,deny Allow from all RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/$1 [L,QSA]

35. 35 Tips Observe Before You Act Act on Monitoring Results Don’t Overload Your System

36. Q&A

37. 37 Conference Roadmap TH9:Building a Fast and Rich Web App with PHP 5 TH10:Troubleshooting Apache configurations TH19:mod_perl for Speed Freaks! TH22:Garbage collection tuning for java server processes FR12:Getting everything out of Apache Derby database FR1:Scaling httpd 2.x to 50,000 Concurrent Downloads FR5:Apache Performance Tuning Part 2: Scaling Out FR24:PHP and MySQL Best Practices 2.0

38. Current Version http://people.apache.org/~sctemme/ApconEU2006/FR4/

39. Thank You

40. 40 Further Reading Ryan B. Bloom, Apache Server 2.0: The Complete Reference, 2002 McGraw Hill Osborne; ISBN 0-07-222344-8 Ben Laurie and Peter Laurie, Apache: The Definitive Guide (3rd Edition), 2002 O’Reilly & Associates; ISBN 0596002033 Patrick Killelea, Web Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition, 2002 O’Reilly & Associates; ISBN 0-596-00172-X http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/misc/perf-tuning.html http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/perf-tuning.html Adrian Cockcroft, Richard Pettit and Sun Microsystems Press, Sun Performance and Tuning: Java and the Internet (2nd Edition), 1998 Prentice Hall PTR; ISBN 0130952494 Ken Coar and Rich Bowen, Apache Cookbook, 2003 O’Reilly & Associates; ISBN 0596001916