performance modifications

[Joseph Koshy]

> I'm wondering if anyone on the list has a good source for 
> the major sysctl settings and/or kernel settings that can be 
> modified in order to bring up the performance level on a 
> FreeBSD 5.3 machine that is used with apache under heavy
> load.

There is the tuning(7) manual page.

There are better web servers than Apache for demanding loads;
ones that used a non-forking, event-driven I/O model.  
Aolserver and thttpd come to mind.

Yaoping Ruan and Vivek Pai from Princeton have reported 
excellent results with their "Flash" [1] web server.  While
many of their recommended changes to FreeBSD have been folded
into the base source, I'm not sure how many popular web-servers
are using these speedups.

[1] Making the "Box" Transparent: System Call Performance as a
    First-class Result
    Yaoping Ruan, Vivek Pai
    http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~yruan/debox/debox.pdf

-- 
FreeBSD Volunteer, http://people.freebsd.org/~jkoshy