topic Re: Apche build help in Operating System - HP-UX

Apche build help

Denver Osborn — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 07:31:19 GMT

Hey all,

I've got an Lclass running Apache 2.x that is maintained by developers for their app. They've requested we add another node that will be used to serve up nothing but images, so we're adding a box to do just that. Here's my dilema. The developers don't want to change how they build their Apache. At the moment it's build static w/ mpm prefork, mod_ssl and a handfull of other modules. I'm trying to persuade them that we might see better performance from this "image" server if we trim the fat from Apache and build it with mpm worker to make it fully threaded.

Wouldn't it be better for performance if we build Apache to use dymanic modules and with mpm worker? After all, it's only purpose will be to server up images and will be secure...

What type of metrics should be used to compare HP's Apache Build -vs- my developer's build?

Thanks for all the input!
-denver

Re: Apche build help

Richard Allen — Tue, 23 Mar 2004 09:06:28 GMT

I maintain a small Free (OpenSource) project. We regularly release new files that are quite large.
We have a Intel server running Red Hat Linux and the Apache httpd that's included in that distro, which is a full blown webserver.
At release times, the box would get bogged down and almost buckle under the pressure from people downloading. So we investigated.
Turned out that it was total folley to use such a full blown httpd for a simple file transfer.

I built a very stripped down apache, ran it on another port on the machine and directed downloads to it. That dramaticly cut down on the load and more people could download at the same time. Still there where problems.
So I ended up changing the downloads to use the ftp server (ftp:// urls) and now bandwidth is the limiting factor :)

Re: Apche build help

Steven E. Protter — Tue, 23 Mar 2004 10:10:26 GMT

There is a lot of fat in apache thats not needed. You should do some performance monitoring with glance or my system.perf.sh scripts once you have your build.

I'd watch cpu,shared memory use and networking.

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