Server monitoring is a big part of running a solid web site.  As an admin, you must know what is going on your server.  One of the tools most Linux/Unix admins are used to is called “top”.  “top” by itself is a very powerful tool.  Here is a quick guide on how to read output from top:  introduction to load averages under top.  It just makes sense that somebody went and created httptop to monitor http traffic.

Install perl modules:

install Term::ReadKey
install File::Tail
install Time::HiRes

Now copy paste the script below and save it in a location and set +x attribute on it so you can execute it.  On my …

One of the things people tend to forget is the ability for web servers to compress content before sending it back to client. Client’s browser then uncompresses the data and displays it to the user. Pretty much all of the recent browsers support gzip compression. In this post, I will go over how to setup apache2 to use compression. First let’s see if your Apache installation has “deflate” enabled. You can check to see if you have deflate by typing:

# /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl -t -D DUMP_MODULES
Loaded Modules:
...
deflate_module (static)
...
Syntax OK

If you don’t have have deflate_module, you would have to recompile your apache with “–enable-deflate” option.

Going forward, I am going to assume you have deflate_module. Add the following to your apache conf file:

<Location />
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
BrowserMatch …

We were having issues with mysql threads where they would be in sleep mode and wouldn’t die off for long time. At the same time we started having issues with our servers where the load will spike and eventually server will come to halt unless we killed all the apache processes and restarted apache [...]

I have been asked numerous times what does “load average” means in top. If you don’t know what top is and you have access to linux machine, go type top now and see what it shows.

load average: 2.05, 2.17, 1.93

Quick answer is: first number (2.05) is 1 minute avg, second number (2.17) is 5 minute avg, third number (1.93) is 15 min avg. Generally system admins look at these #’s to see how is their server is doing. But now you wonder, if this is the #’s you look at, why is there cpu %? Isn’t that computer load also? Ofcourse it is. BUT, meaning of cpu % shown in [ Cpu(s): 14.2% us, 1.7% sy, 0.0% ni, 80.7% id, 3.1% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.3% si, 0.0% st ] actually just means how much % of time was spent doing stuff on cpu. On the other hand, load average takes other things such as how much cpu’s were being used and how many process had to wait for their turn to use cpu, etc. Thats why sometimes you will see high % for Cpu …

Problem:

One of the sites I maintain has been getting more and more traffic everyday. A very good thing for the site, not so good for the solo server which is serving those pages. The site is VERY dynamic with LAMP setup. We only have one server serving our web pages to our users. Since its a dynamic site with PHP and MySQL, it has a lot of load during peak times. Average load time of a page is between 1-2 secs during normal usage, 2-5 secs under average to heavy load.

During heavy load, we started to see our mysql stop responding to requests which is a big concern for us since we don’t show content if there is no db connection. We had to come with a solution, fast, to prevent this issue from appearing.

Solution:

So here are couple things I ended up doing on the server side to reduce load on this server without having to do much code change.

• We have couple other …