Server Tuning

Some notes on tuning a server for MKDoc, this is based on a development server with less than 1G of RAM, a production server with a decent amount of RAM should be able to have a higher figure for ther Apache MaxClients!

mod_perl

See the Performance Tuning document from the mod_perl 1.0 User Guide.

If you install the GTop module and add this code (based on the Calculating Real Memory Usage code) to the end of mkdoc.cgi (before 1;):

use GTop;
my $proc_mem = GTop->new->proc_mem($$);
my $diff     = $proc_mem->size - $proc_mem->share;
$diff = $diff/1024;
$diff = $diff/1024;
my $size = $proc_mem->size;
$size = $size/1024;
$size = $size/1024;
my $share = $proc_mem->share;
$share = $share/1024;
$share = $share/1024;
print STDERR "Difference is $diff MB, Size is $size MB and Share is $share MB\n";

Then you will get lines like this written to the error log:

Difference is 40.4765625 MB, Size is 45.234375 MB and Share is 4.7578125 MB
Difference is 40.73828125 MB, Size is 45.49609375 MB and Share is 4.7578125 MB
Difference is 42.01171875 MB, Size is 46.76953125 MB and Share is 4.7578125 MB
Difference is 40.9453125 MB, Size is 45.6875 MB and Share is 4.7421875 MB
Difference is 41.69921875 MB, Size is 46.44140625 MB and Share is 4.7421875 MB

This basically means that each Apache process uses around 40MB of RAM and in addition there is about 5MB of shared RAM.

.
              Total RAM Dedicated to the Webserver
 MaxClients = ------------------------------------
                    MAX child's process size

So for example if you have 256M dedicated to Apache:

.
               256M
 MaxClients = ------ = 6
                40M

MySQL

See the Solving Memory Bottlenecks section of the High Performance MySQL book.

Each apache process will use one MySQL process so the MySQL max_connections should not be set to be less than the Apache MaxClients.

The MySQL you have probably came with sample config files for different situations, for example in /usr/share/mysql/*.cnf — it's probably best to pick the one best suited and use this as a basis for the MySQL main config file, /etc/my.cnf.

You can view the variables like this:

mysqladmin -uroot -pXXX variables

And you can see the number of processes like this:

mysqladmin -uroot -pXXX processlist

The mytop perl module is good for displaying mysql processes dynamically.

This is the calculation you need to do for the memory usage:

min_memory_needed = global_buffers + (thread_buffers * max_connections)

This is a simple script to get these variables:

For example:

thread_buffers
---------------------------+---------
sort_buffer_size           |  1048568
myisam_sort_buffer_size    | 67108864
read_buffer_size           |  1044480
join_buffer_size           |   131072
read_rnd_buffer_size       |   262144
---------------------------+----------
TOTAL                      | 69595128 bytes (66M)

global_buffers
---------------------------+----------
key_buffer_size            | 268435456
net_buffer_length          |     16384
---------------------------+----------
TOTAL                      | 268451840 bytes (256M)

So if the max_connections = 6 then MySQL will need:

652 = 256 + (6 x 66)