Thanks for this informative guidelines, hopefully will give it a try.

I’m in the middle of building my new personal webserver and your guides are somewhat a blueprint for my new config. (centos 7 + virtualmin + php 5.6 + opcache + apcu + w3tc and some customized minify). >> Requests per second: 784.50 [#/sec] (mean).

Next test willbe varnish in front of apache with ssl offloading to nginx.

My old setup was active for the last 3 years (virtualmin + varnish + nginx + apache + csf etc etc) but a lot has changed the last years…. :)

Go to the Wayback Machine for an archived version of the Apache optimization tutorial.

Thank you in advance!

Hello, Neelim… thank you for your compliments! I have created these tutorials as a way to remember (for myself) how to set up my servers. I am glad to hear when others have followed these steps as well. I am not a sysadmin… just a web designer who enjoys the responsibility of configuring and running my own servers.

Following are some suggestions; you can find steps for most of these on this site. Some of my tutorials are getting quite old, so “your mileage may vary”.

Firewall with ConfigServer, pay attention to configuration, and understand what each setting will do.

In W3 Total Cache settings, choose APC for page, minify and object cache. Turn off database cache, as it will not be much needed if MySQL is setup correctly (W3 db cache is OK for shared hosting accounts if you can’t configure MySQL); if db is on a separate server, consider using memcache… if you have a single server, this is not applicable.

W3 minify: choose Manual, not automatic; this requires some knowledge of your WordPress theme’s css and javascript, and choosing appropriate loading method and order for each file. I think the automatic minify is a bad idea if you use a CDN, because all of the css and all of the js files are combined into 2 large local files. If you cannot get minified files to work properly, then just turn off minify and use CDN.

Use a CDN; W3 does an excellent job of sending static files to CDN. This will take a huge load off your web server. If you don’t have an off-server CDN, find a plugin e.g. Use Google Libraries to offload common .js files.

Be sure to optimize MySQL with tips from MySQL Tuning Primer; run server under expected load for at least 24hrs between changes to my.conf.

Allocate more apc.shm_size per Virtual Server in php.ini APC configuration, and make sure PHP memory_limit is sufficient to handle shm_size… perhaps 2x or 3x apc.shm_size.

Test, tweak, test, tweak… use webpagetest.org; use Chrome or Safari Web Inspector and make sure your web server is actually caching by examining the request and response headers.

Also consider using Varnish in front of Apache… I’m not doing this at the moment, but plan to set it up on my system again, soon.

And realize the memory usage reported by Virtualmin’s dashboard is ~somewhat~ misleading, as it reports cached memory as free memory. Check actual memory usage via top.

I have gone through all almost of your tutorials and they are great. I am running a SSD Cloud server with two VCores and 4GB RAM. I have installed cent OS 6 with virtualim on it. I will use this for hosting WordPress and custom PHP Sites, the sites will have aveage load. I will be also hosting x2CRM on that server. I have tried to install APC and tried to optimize Apache-PHP-MySQL but couldn’t find any complete guide for it. One thing I have noticed that RAM remains unused and cpu gets high load. can you provide some suggestions please.

Thanks

Quite true. With fcgid you will need to also account for the RAM you dedicate to each account, and also APC cache allocation… but this is easy to figure out if you have a default setting for many accounts, or a limited number of individually allocated accounts.

That method is sound but it doesn’t take into consideration whether PHP is used and with which handler…

I.e. I am using mod_fcgid so if I calculate my max apache processes via that method, I’ll run out of RAM very soon since my php-cgi processes are way bigger and more than my apache2 processes….