question on hosting and memory

[Sander Holthaus - Orange XL]

owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org wrote:
> On Aug 3, 2005, at 11:27 PM, David Banning wrote:
> 
>> I am running apache 1.3 with php and I find when that for each person
>> who visits the site, an additional 29 meg is consumed of my measly
>> 512M. Searching around, it seems like this is relatively normal.
>> 
>> So here is my question. How do big-time servers handle these type of
>> memory requirements? Presumably there are servers out there getting
>> thousands of visitors at once. Do they have 29 Meg * 1000 for every
>> thousand visitors? At what memory ceiling do they setup another
>> server machine to handle the load? Wouldn't it require a ton of
>> servers to handle a load of a thousand visitors?
>> 
> 
> It all depends on what the PHP is doing.  On one server I
> run, the hold up is not memory, but actually processing 200
> PHP scripts with db accesses at once, even with code
> acceleration products installed.
> 
> I have a dual athlon 2800+ system with 4GB of memory.  It can
> handle 200-240 httpd processes (apache2) with PHP5 running
> the postnuke system and phpbb2 (postnuke version).  The
> memory is only half used but the system load starts to go sky
> high when we start to get much over 200 httpd, depending on
> what mix of modules people are using, when enough processes
> need to run at once.  The CPU is not pegged, but the run queue gets
> too long. 
> 
> I am continuing to try and tune things and improve things,
> but so far this is about where we are at.  Before I put a
> code accelerator in (we have tested the commercial Zend one
> [and still are testing] but run with eaccelerator most of the
> time) we hit the wall much sooner.
> 
> (Note that the mysql DB is on another machine on the LAN).
> 
> Chad
> 
>> I am nowhere in this league, but the question comes to mind because
>> it seems crazy that 20 visitors to my site can clog things up, simply
>> because I choose to run apache and php.
>> 
>> I have been looking at lighttpd decrease memory usage, but I require
>> url rewriting and I find the documentation for lighttpd is lacking
>> is this area. 
>> 
>> Any comments or suggestions are welcome -

You might want to consider LiteSpeed WebServer. They have a standard (free)
version and a pro (paid) version that should perform much better than Apache
and PHP. It should even perform better as Lighttpd and has the same
rewriting-syntax as Apache. (In fact, it closely resembles Apache in terms
of configuration).

Kind Regards,
Sander Holthaus