Web Servers General Talk - Apache 2 static file serving performance

Author

Apache 2 static file serving performance

count_zer0

2006-01-16, 8:04 am

I am running an Apache 2 webserver on a
Pentium 4 2.8GHz with 2GB RAM. The function of the webserver is as a tag server i.e. it is serving a 1x1 pixel GIF and logging these requests. The size of the image is 43 bytes, the total size of a request is typically 500 bytes. The machine is serving 1 million requests per day.

I am have performance monitoring software checking the request times, and during peak times (lunchtime, early evenings), these are very slow - between 2 and 20 seconds to serve this GIF.

1. Based on the above spec. machine, is this a poor performance? I thought Apache was capable of much higher performance.

2. Is there a way of tweaking the Apache settings to improve the response times?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

count_zer0

2006-02-06, 5:00 am

A follow-up to this post:

The solution was to enable mod-status on the web server. This revealed that the connections were being hogged by keep-alives and processes remaining from gracefully restarting. This was causing new requests to be queued up. Reducing the KeepAliveTimeout, increasing MaxClients and restarting the server (by stopping and starting it) solved the problem - response time went from 20 seconds to 0.2 seconds.