*BSD News Article 76531


Return to BSD News archive

Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!qns3.qns.net!imci4!newsfeed.internetmci.com!howland.erols.net!news1.erols.com!news
From: Ken Bigelow <kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Apache & BSD Netowrk problems
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 1996 19:36:26 -0700
Organization: A poorly-installed InterNetNews site
Lines: 41
Message-ID: <321A762A.4E91@www.play-hookey.com>
References: <4vbeaa$f2l@news1.halcyon.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: kenjb05.play-hookey.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.02 (Win16; I)
To: Aaron Mitchell <dorian@coho.halcyon.com>

Aaron Mitchell wrote:
> 
> I'm having some problems keeping my web server system (P5-133 96 megs RAM
> ISA NE2000 Network Card, Scsi Saturn 2gig) up.  I am web hosting a
> customer who gets about 10,000 visiotors a day, but as soon as I put him
> on the server it continually crashes as soon as apache opens too many
> servers to respond to requests.  The default apache MaxClients is 150,
> which I lowered to 60, but it will still crash unless I top it out around
> 45 or 50.  The machine was running on 32 megs of ram (which I upgraded to
> 96 thinking that apache was crashing due to going into swap) but it still
> crashes around the same hit load.  Could this be a problem with a poor
> network card (generic NE2000) I will be putting in a 3c509 tomorrow, but
> if that doesn't work I'll be about ready to ditch it and buy an UltraSPARC
> (which I would rather not do).  Does anyone have any ideas on how to get
> this web server back into shape? (Please reply by email if possible) Thank
> you.
> 

I am also running Apache (1.1.1, now) on FreeBSD 2.1R and have had no 
trouble. I don't have the hit load you report, but I do get regular 
access.

By any chance have you left your kernel as the GENERIC one? If so, you 
probably need to up your MAXUSER count and then recompile. The GENERIC 
kernel in 2.1R is set to 10, and this severely limits the number of 
overall processes the system will support. See the calculation in the 
Handbook, where it discusses recompiling the kernel. I'd guess you want 
to up it to around 60, but you can figure it out according to the needs 
of your system.

You may not need all that much RAM for your application (I've only got 
32MB), but you might want to run top or a similar utility to check the 
operating stats before you decide.

I hope this helps!
-- 
Ken

Are you interested in   |
byte-sized education    |   http://www.play-hookey.com
over the Internet?      |