overloaded webserver: nfs wait issue?

[N.J. Thomas]

* Norberto Meijome <freebsd at meijome.net> [2005-12-02 11:06:49 +1100]:
> What's your MaxClients set to?

It was set to 256, we actually lowered it to 180.

> Please define your values for "lot of traffic".

Running wc -l on the daily Apache access logs, I get: ~1.8million hits
per day 

> What CPU? RAM (512MB seems a bit low nowadays)? Disks?

One of the web servers is a (P4, 3GHz, 1GB RAM), the other is a (P3,
1.4GHz, 1GB RAM), they are load balanced evenly, both of them display
the same error when the number of httpd processes reach MaxClients.

> I dont think i can give much advice on the NFS side of things but in the 
> meantime I would :
>  - increase # of MaxClients (the default is RIDICULOUSLY small, 
> specially in 1.3. You will probably have to recompile with a new max.

Higher than 256?

> - Look at what the PHP scripts do : i.e., is there anything under your 
> control that can be improved?

I'll ask the devs to take a look.

>  - You RAM seems OK ... you may want to tweak some sysctl or memory 
> settings in Apache (I seem to remember in 1.3 some to do with MMap,  but 
> i could be wrong) ... or just add more RAM. Check vmstat (or systat -vm 
> 1) to see how much swapping is going on.

Will do...thanks for the suggestions.

Thomas

-- 
N.J. Thomas
njt at ayvali.org
Etiamsi occiderit me, in ipso sperabo