Apache tuning and speed

Hello !

I have quite strong server, Poweredge Dual quad core, SAS disks and 16GB RAM, Gentoo os, 64 bit.
I'm wondering why is my server so slow in peak times.

i get about 3000 tasks, 6GB used out of 16GB, load 1,16

some pages are loading very slow, especially pictures, i tried to play with apache settings, but still cant get satisfied speed of my web.

i'm running Prefork MPM,
last config is

<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
StartServers 400
MinSpareServers 100
MaxSpareServers 400
ServerLimit 4000
MaxClients 4000
MaxRequestsPerChild 2000
</IfModule>
KeepAliveTimeout 12
KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 0


Can someone tell me how to speed up site a bit more , i wanna focus more on CPU, cuz it seems like using only 10, 20% of CPU resources ...

 

With that many child processes, Apache tends to slow down a lot. The best thing to do is to switch to Lighttpd, which handles those high number of concurrent connections a lot better than Apache and with much less memory usage.

Can you post your 'top' ouput? That will give us a better idea of what is going on.

 

Try turning keep alive off or reducing the keep alive timeout to 2 or 3 seconds. If you decide to leave keepalive on, try setting MaxKeepAliveRequests to 200-300 as well.

Also take a look at http://www.litespeedtech.com, highly recommended.

Also do you have 10mbps or 100mbps connection? That could be the reason it is slow.

 

i m a newbie to apache but I've read read somewhere, start servers should not have a high value.
on my server its the default value, i think 5 or 15.