Guys i got a problem. You see i own 2 high traffic sites, around 100,000 uniques/day combined. I have seeksadmin and platinumservermanagement to administer my server. One time the sites are kinda slow-loading so i issued a ticket to both admins for them to check on what's going on. They found out that my apache maxusers has been pushed to its limits, about 2,000 concurrent connections. The problem is that each of them had different opinions with Apache: Seeksadmin told me that they can increase the maxusers for apache to a much higher one, coz they see that my cpu load is always below 1 and my ram usage is below 30%. PSM on the otherhand, told me that they cannot increase apache maxusers further >2000 coz they said apache has a hardware limit of 2000 and i must split the traffic by getting another server. But my cpu and server load is way below being overloaded. Here are my server specs: Intel Core2duo 6600 8GB ram 250x2GB HDD My average server load is most of the time < 1. And ram usage most of the time < 30%. What do you think? Can my server handle >2000 maxusers for Apache? I'm really confused, as both admins gave different conclusions. Hope anyone can help me.
I'd suggest load balancing setup...default apache has 256 maxclients possible, while this can be extended by recompiling apache...your RAM and CPU might be higher than normal standards...but OS and general softwares never assume people should have very powerful boxes. Why don't you try lighttpd instead of apache?
Perhaps ask PSM admin for some more details regrading the hardware limit? AFAIK, Apache 2 can have tens of thousands of concurrent connections so there is no problems with a software limit.
Thanks for the replies guys. My server just crashed twice 2 hours ago even if the cpu load was <1 and ram usage was below 20%.
Get a better processor. apache cannot handle 2k userson a dual core processor. Get a Clovertown. It might increase the expense, but that gives you better stability or, get another server and use Load Balancing.
Based on how the site is developed a solution like light httpd might work for you. Maybe check out www.totalserversolutions.com. They manage a lot of servers and are honest. There are a few firms who have forums on here who use them to manage their services.