Tutorial: Example configurations for better performance

aaP_loonysnow

After much agony, when it would seem that everything is set up perfectly, and the site is still loading for a long time, I was able to find the best config for a bundle of MariaDB 10.5 + PHP 8.0 + Apache 2.4 (yes, not NGINX) + OPcache extension + APCU extension.

P.S. What the built-in "Optimization" functionality offers is complete nonsense, only complementing the friezes, no matter how beautiful "aaPanel" is.

P.P.S. I have a whole fleet of VPS for various clients where "aaPanel" is installed. Believe my experience.

And so, config for VPS 4 CPU, 8GB RAM, SSD (not HDD).

MariaDB:
key_buffer_size = 1200
query_cache_size = 50
tmp_table_size = 128
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 4096
innodb_log_buffer_size = 32
sort_buffer_size = 2048
read_buffer_size = 256
read_rnd_buffer_size = 512
join_buffer_size = 2048
thread_stack = 512
binlog_cache_size = 64
thread_cache_size = 16
table_open_cache = 2048
max_connections = 200

PHP:
max_children = 4
start_servers = 2
min_spare_servers = 1
max_spare_servers = 2

Apache:
Timeout 30
KeepAliveTimeout 5
MaxKeepAliveRequests 200
StartServers 4
MaxSpareThreads 50
MinSpareThreads 20
ThreadsPerChild 50
MaxRequestWorkers 200
MaxConnectionsPerChild 10000

After setting the parameters, BE SURE to save and restart the server. It's fast.

Result:
An example on the "heaviest" project that I have to support.
The server response on a WordPress multisite with more than 50 sites inside loads not 1.5 seconds, but 0.543 seconds.

With "WP Super Cache" caching enabled in 0.3 seconds.

aaP_loonysnow

A little later I will show the configuration for a VPS with 2 CPUs, 6GB RAM.

UPD:
I forgot to add: the WordPress site from the example has an attendance of 70+ thousand unique users per month.
Information for understanding about the load on the server and that it copes with it perfectly.

klaus

aaP_loonysnow 70k users per months means roughly 1 user at 5 seconds is not such a big load. If half of them are visitors than doesn't even coun't because of WP Super Cache. So practically you get a user at every 6-7 seconds that request something so you have like 20 to 40 requests per second.

Nginx is not magically improve the performance it just works differently and use less resources.

You have KeepAlive settings but you don't have KeepAlive on, that would enable KeepAlive in the first place,

MaxConnectionsPerChild 0 This is again just pointless, you can lower from default of 1000 to 500-300 if you have KeepAlive on but you don't keep that ON and you set this to 0, this will cause memory leaks and your server will fail under ddos in seconds.

KeepAliveTimeout 5 this should be 2 or 3 for your loading time of 0.543, but would not matter in this case because KeepAlive is not enabled.

aaP_loonysnow

klaus

The fact is that there is not one such site on the server. A lot of WordPress projects, Laravel, MODX. And they all eat up resources.

KeepAlive is enabled by default. It's not even up for discussion.

About DDoS: Projects are connected via CloudFlare and fail2ban is hard-configured. Of course, this will not protect against a serious attack, but first try to find a server. If the issue with MaxConnectionsPerChild is important to you, then set the value to 10000.

Dhanamerdeka

I really glad someone sharing this.... and it's apache...
on past i already sharing for "OLS" but i didn't know much about how to optimize it for apache....

thanks alot bro...
maybe if i can suggest you.... you can make "1CPU, 1GB/2GB ram" for baseline optimization

i really sure, if we know how roughly the baseline is.... the higher spec can be easily calculated too....

thanks.... thanks alot for the sharing!

aaP_loonysnow

Dhanamerdeka

With this configuration, it is better to install HestiaCP.
I will try to conduct tests, but I doubt very much about good results.

UPD:
I made a mistake in the message above.
"The fact is that there are many other sites on the server." instead of "The fact is that there is not one such site on the server."

English is not my native language, I use a translator.

klaus

aaP_loonysnow I don't use apache so i know basics about it, in the past KeepAlive was off by default if is on now okay.

The MaxConnectionsPerChild directive sets the limit on the number of connections that an individual child server process will handle. After MaxConnectionsPerChild connections, the child process will die. If MaxConnectionsPerChild is 0, then the process will never expire.

Setting MaxConnectionsPerChild to a non-zero value limits the amount of memory that a process can consume by (accidental) memory leakage.

This is pretty simple why this shouldn't be on 0 on a live server but you do you.

Any protection outside physical firewall are useless on a large scale ddos.

Dhanamerdeka

aaP_loonysnow I hope i can find the best optimization configuration soon....
BTW Keep Alive on Apache Aapanel isn't on by default...
2 server that i install aapanel to... they two had all keep alive on by default BUT not really turned on

how to fix this is just to turn off keep alive and then save
after it you can turn it on again.....

i check it from https://technumero.com/keep-alive-test/

aaP_loonysnow

klaus

I know what each parameter is responsible for.
The problem with aaPanel was the inactivity of the usual configurations, such as in the classic LAMP or HestiaCP, and I was tired of selecting the optimal parameters.

But thanks anyway! I'll leave it as it is for myself, but for other users it would be worth changing the parameter.

@aaPanel_Kern

I would like to ask one of the moderators to replace Apache's "MaxConnectionsPerChild" from 0 to 10000 in the first message, since I don't have the ability to edit :<

Dhanamerdeka

aaP_loonysnow Btw if we start from 1CPU 1GB ram Server
does "MaxConnectionsPerChild" => 10000 should be placed
or we should make it smaller? like.... 5000 or others?

i confuse about this setting....

aaP_loonysnow

Dhanamerdeka

Conducted tests with VPS 1 CPU core and 1GB RAM.

Apache 2.4.56 + PHP 8.0 (OPcache + APCU + imagemagick) + MySQL 5.7.40.

MariaDB for some reason stopped being installed even on better hardware, and MySQL 8 requires at least 6GB of RAM.

A real WordPress-based website was taken as a basis (full of plugins, heavy theme, WP Super Cache, Autoptimize).

Results:
Without caching, the server response averages 800-900ms.
With caching of about 100-150ms.

The whole problem is the number of cores. I advise you to install at least 2 CPU cores.

Given the limitations of iron, the result is very good. For personal projects or a blog, that's the thing.

MySQL:
key_buffer_size = 16
query_cache_size = 0
tmp_table_size = 32
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 512
innodb_log_buffer_size = 8
sort_buffer_size = 1024
read_buffer_size = 1024
read_rnd_buffer_size = 4096
join_buffer_size = 1024
thread_stack = 192
binlog_cache_size = 32
thread_cache_size = 8
table_open_cache = 64
max_connections = 20

PHP:
max_children = 10
start_servers = 2
min_spare_servers = 1
max_spare_servers = 3

Apache:
Timeout = 30
KeepAlive = On
KeepAliveTimeout = 5
MaxKeepAliveRequests = 100
StartServers = 2
MaxSpareThreads = 25
MinSpareThreads = 10
ThreadsPerChild = 25
MaxRequestWorkers = 50
MaxConnectionsPerChild = 5000

klaus

Dhanamerdeka That is basically a setting for memory leaks, depend on how much visitors you expect you can lower or increase that one on the run, start with 500 on linux, mostly that problem persist on windows servers.

If you don't need a feature from apache better use nginx.

Dhanamerdeka

klaus do you had better configuration? share it on here bro

well i need apache that's why i need to optimize them
for nginx i didn't want to change all my sites to nginx yet, since i need to recoding something

klaus

Dhanamerdeka

KeepAlive = On
KeepAliveTimeout = 2
StartServers 2
MinSpareServers 2
MaxSpareServers 10
MaxClients 5
MaxRequestsPerChild 300
AllowOverride None

You should gradually move toward nginx the problem with apache is the memory you need atleast 2 GB of RAM to use it, after all the minimum requirements are 4GB and thats only for apache.

Mysql need's by default 512MB of RAM.

innodb_buffer_pool_size = 180M with this settings you can limit the RAM ussage, a high value is pointless

Mysql is runing on a local server so if you have a ssd on it the access is pretty fast there is no point to use your ram for nothing.

sort_buffer_size = 10M
read_buffer_size = 10M ( always on mysql configuration use M (MB) because if you use 1024 is translated to bytes and the sort_buffer_size have a minimum value of 32768 bytes so that's being said, 1024 is a useless number used two times in the above configuration, read_buffer_size have a 8192 minimum value)

The best configuration is your own, just modify the things to suit your server, allways ping your website when is not under a CDN ( like Cloudflare) that is useless because you don't ping your server so you don't know the real numbers, using cache to serve static files that again improve the load on server and you can see above the performance is not great for dynamic content so you should modify the settings and improve the performance of the most used service on the VPS that would be apache.

And run PHP in fastcgi mode, https://httpd.apache.org/mod_fcgid/ .

https://www.php.net/manual/en/faq.installation.php#faq.installation.apache2

Doing some research on your own is better than any "better performance" configuration you can find on internet.

Without caching, the server response averages 800-900ms.
With caching of about 100-150ms.

Even default settings can do better than this.

Add atleast 1GB of RAM and a second CPU the second one is important when you get more visitors the first one will give apache enought memory to don't care about them atleast for a time.