When your boss has a gun to your head

[naja7host]

or: Just trying to configure Apache on cPanel

[chris]

I am using a simple peaceful configuration on servers, prefork checked, suphp and thats it. End of story. Happy end.

But since one server got really heavy traffic it started raising load. Huge load. From 1 and 2 raised to 12, 15 sometimes I got 70-80 spikes.
It was the ..era that I started searching for alternatives.

Igor helped me so much that I owe him (if you ever need vacations in Greece drop me a mail! really!).

But still I got some questions, and if someone want to share his configuration to compare I would really be grateful.

Plan a) I tried mod_ruid2 with dso. Everything worked fine. Flawless. Pages served ultra fast, load dropped to 0.4~0.8 (!)Until Igor informed me that I should try for security reasons to avoid it. I got my first facepalm here :-)

Question: -anyone having issues with that in a security manner ? Is it safe in a long term ?

Plan b) I dropped mod_ruid2 and recompiled apache with worker. Checked fastcgi and eaccelerator.
Wonderful idea. Load dropped, pages still loading fast and all ok.

But then I saw that the server was swapping. And it has 8GB of memory. I also noticed that
/tmp/eaccelerator was empty and after a while errors, errors 500 everywhere. Damn.

Question: Worker affects the way that caching works and saved everything in memory ? Or it was just a misconfiguration?

Plan c) Recompiled again with prefork. Using fcgi again, I got low loads, pages serving fast all ok.
But enabling eaccelerator, I saw a io raise, in top a 7-10 sometimes 15%wa and the
/tmp/eaccelerator was 1.5GB in minutes.

Question: Using prefork forces eaccelerator to use disk ? Or the previous configuration was just luck and using ram?
Now I got higher loads with using eaccelerator than without it. Now I just have fcgi without opcode caching enabled.

So what others using on servers with high loads ? Anyone that want to share a configuration to test I would be grateful.Any other ways to run suPHP or fcgid more efficiently?

Except of course DSO or cgi. OK I need a stress-free-low-load server but without sacrificing security. I dont want to restore 200 backups if one account gets compromised. :-)

[iseletsk]

B is still a viable alternative, you just need to adjust number of workers/idle timeouts/ttl for them. Then server will stop swapping and most likely -- you will stop getting 500 errors.

[2webmaster]

I have our servers set up just like "B" They run just fine.
I set up eaccelerator

http://www.cloudlinux.com/solutions/forum/messages/forum11/topic433/message2019/?sphrase_id=59691#message2019

works great