ServerBuddies Support Blog

Optimizing Parallels Plesk Panel in VPS

This makes the Panel use less memory than other control panels available on the market, which ensures better utilization of hardware resources and increased density of virtual environments per server.

If you deploy Parallels Plesk Panel in Parallels Virtuozzo Containers for Linux, consider switching the Panel to a special mode of operation - optimized for virtual environments.

The mode switches off InnoDB engine in MySQL database server, and Apache web server modules that are not critical for hosting services.

The only disadvantages of using the optimized mode are as follows:

* Web applications requiring InnoDB will not work.
* Perl, python and ASP scripts will not work because the required Apache modules will be switched off.
* PHP will be available only through CGI.

Note: It is not applicable to the Panel installations upgraded from earlier versions.

Reference: http://parallels.com/

Optimizing Apache

Apache can be tweaked by changing a few of its settings to make it work faster with respect to the capability your server possess.

Some of the values that can be tweaked in the ‘Global’ section of Apache configuration file (found at /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf) are explained below:

Timeout

This directive sets the maximum amount of time the server will allow a connection to remain open. The default value of 1200 (20 minutes) is appropriate for most instances.

KeepAlive

With this directive set to on, the server will attempt to record the userid of each query to the server. Keep this directive set to off unless you are willing to devote a significant amount of network bandwidth to this function.

MaxSpareServers and MinSpareServers

Apache has several statements to configure the number of clients being handled and the number of child-processes it forks off to deal with those requests. If the machine running the Apache installation is not intended for anything but running Apache, it is generally a good idea to make these numbers as high as possible, but not so high that the machine starts paging memory out to its swap space.

MaxRequestsPerChild

The MaxRequestsPerChild directive sets the limit on the number of requests that an individual child process can handle during its lifetime. After MaxRequestsPerChild requests, the child process will die. If MaxRequestsPerChild is zero, the process will live until the server kills it (because it is no longer needed, which will depend on the value of MinSpareServers and the number of current requests) or until the server itself is stopped.

Optimizing the EXT3 file system on Linux

There are some things you can do to give ext3 a boost when you just want speed.

Mount Options noatime,nodiratime

noatime
Do not update inode access times on this file system (e.g, for faster access on the news spool to speed up news servers).

nodiratime
Do not update directory inode access times on this filesystem.

This is one of the quickest and easiest performance gains. This mount option tells the system not to update inode access times. This is a good option for web servers, news servers or other uses with high access file systems

Also from the man pages.

commit=nrsec
Sync all data and metadata every nrsec seconds. The default value is 5 seconds. Zero means default.