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All Services (gs) Grid-Service (dv) Dedicated-Virtual Server (ve) Server ProCDN

Optimizing your (dv) server

Applies to: (dv) 3.0, (dv) 3.5, (dv) 4.0
Difficulty: Medium
Time needed: 20 minutes
Tools needed: SSH, root access, vi knowledge

Applies to: (dv) 4.0
- Difficulty: Easy
- Time Needed: 10
- Tools Required: None
Applies to: (dv) 3.5
- Difficulty: Easy
- Time Needed: 10
- Tools Required: None
Applies to: (dv) 3.0
- Difficulty: Medium
- Time Needed: 20
- Tools Required: SSH, root access, vi knowledge

Overview

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.

Otto Can Help!

If you're having trouble with the steps described in this article, additional assistance is available through our OttoTune service. Our expert engineers can tweak and tune your server for optimum performance. For more information on what Otto can do for you, please visit this article.

TIP:

On a new (dv) Dedicated-Virtual Server 4.0, these optimizations have already been completed.

TIP:

On a (dv) Dedicated-Virtual Server 3.5, these optimizations have already been completed.

End of Life Warning

This service has a pending End of Life. Please move to a current service as soon as possible. For more information, please see: (dv) Dedicated-Virtual 4.0: Migration Information.

READ ME FIRST

This article is provided as a courtesy. Installing, configuring, and troubleshooting third-party applications is outside the scope of support provided by (mt) Media Temple. Please take a moment to review the Statement of Support.

Resources

Making It Better series

NOTE:

Current (dv) 3.0 customers may get many of the same performance increases just by migrating to a (dv) 4.0 server.

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).

NOTE:

The following articles are in order of difficulty and potential gain in performance. It is recommended that you do these articles in the given order and test your server for stability and functionality before continuing to the next article in this series.

Soultions

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.

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