Added to Tips on 5/7/09.

How to add pep to your Slicehost Slice.

There must be something to make Apache go quicker . . .

Photo CC by photograohyandthings

After moving a couple more sites over to my slice, I notice that the performance degraded a bit. Sites were a bit slow to load. I knew I had some pretty cleanly coded sites. WordPress caching was enabled in most cases. In other cases, the sites had very low traffic. This put me at a loss to explain. When I used the top command on the Linux terminal, I found that the memory of 256MB was pretty much consumed. That can be normal enough, since Linux is usually good about using virtual memory. Still, I wasn't satisfied until I found this great forum page where the users 'meppum' and 'drobbins' put in plain English, a good way to speed up your server as long as the sites your hosting are pretty low traffic. They suggested changing your Apache config file to reflect these settings:

• StartServers 1
• MinSpareServers 1
• MaxSpareServers 3
• MaxClients 50

sudo vi /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Also another interesting tidbit was this:

You should also look at the MaxRequestsPerChild settings, and perhaps set it to something other than 0 (unlimited). An Apache process grows in memory size to the size required, but it never shrinks in size. So if a process serves monsterpage.php it will grow to the large memory size required for that page and stay there.

I fiddled with my own settings some. I found that the settings on the top put my server to a screeching halt after 1/2 hour. However, after some minor tweaking, I think I found some settings that work better for me, seen to the left. My sites are loading much snappier than before.