[users@httpd] Many logs or one?

["Mike Jackson" <mjackson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm running a couple Redhat servers with Apache 1.3.36 (which my company is 
sticking with for legacy reasons; I'm sure we'll move to 2.0 or 2.2 
eventually, but everyone here other than me has only used 1.3). It's a 
typical LAMP setup. There's about 250 virtual hosts on a handful of IPs on 
the server I'm particularly concerned with. It averages about 13 busy Apache 
children, bursts up to 40 on a typical day, and MaxChildren is set to 60. 
The system load is typically over 2, and the bottleneck seems to be the disk 
(which is a two-disk SCSI RAID 1 array). iowait is around 4.5%. There's 2GB 
RAM, which is pretty heavily used (it averaged 75MB free over the last 24 
hours). The swap partition is on a secondary IDE drive, and receives minimal 
use.

We currently log all the virtual host activity to individual log files. 
Would it be more efficient to log to single logfile that's later split for 
each vhost? Or would that make the disk utilization worse? Or should I be 
looking to improve efficiency somewhere else? I already know the site PHP 
code is a bit inefficient in how it uses the disks, and I've talked to the 
programmer about cleaning that up a bit. 


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