This article will summarize ways to optimize your (dv) to run with less memory / resources, increase stability, and to ensure higher availability under heavier loads. All newly provisioned (dv) 3.5 servers should already have the settings configured as described in this article.

Symptoms:

• Frequent Apache (httpd) crashes
• Slow server response
• "Server unreachable" errors
• kmemsize warnings in your QoS Alerts (Plesk Control Panel under Virtuozzo)
• privvmpages warnings in your QoS Alerts (Plesk Control Panel under Virtuozzo)
  

DETAILS:

Part 1 - (dv) HOWTO: Basic Apache performance tuning (httpd)
This article will have you lower the Timeout and MaxClients settings in Apache's httpd.conf file. These settings are designed to decrease memory consumption and increase availability of your Apache web server.

• Approximate time to complete this article: 5-20 minutes
• Difficulty level (1-5, 5 being the hardest): 2
• Potential memory freed by this article: 20 MBs to 60 MBs

Part 2 - (dv) HOWTO: Basic MySQL performance tuning (MySQLd)
This article will help you enable query caching in your my.cnf configuration file for MySQL. Although this article will actually increase the memory used by MySQL the performance gain can be dramatic depending on your queries and database usage.

• Approximate time to complete this article: 5-15 minutes
• Difficulty level (1-5, 5 being the hardest): 2
• Memory increase by this article: 16 MBs to 32 MBs

Part 3 - (dv) HOWTO: Misc. performance tuning
This article will have you limit or shutdown services that are running on your server that may not be needed. You may only want to do certain sections of this article as your usage may differ from the article's example.

• Approximate time to complete this article: 5-15 minutes
• Difficulty level (1-5, 5 being the hardest): 3
• Potential memory freed by this article: 60 MBs to 130 MBs

Revisions:

02-16-2009: Added note about Migration