Thanks for all your help... first off I increased MaxRequestsPerChild from 1500 to 10000 on one webserver, just as a test to make sure all is good.... As for KeepAlive, we were told we cannot use it due to we are also using keepalived on our haproxy load balancer, is this true?? As we have a bunch of SSL certs I already had ServerToken set to prod :) I am not sure about UseCanonicalName On, as from what I read it might break our rewrite rules we use them alott So I commneted out mod_dir and Apache would not start I got this error, so I put it back.. Starting httpd: Syntax error on line 22 of /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf: Invalid command 'DirectoryIndex', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration I will disable atime later on this morning, I will mod fstab and reboot one server at a time... the load balancer will autoamtiocally remoe that server form the cluster when its down so ti will not affect any clients.. :) I will read up more on mod_file_cache Thanks again... Rob Morin Systems Administrator Infinity Labs Inc. (514) 387-0638 Ext: 207 -----Original Message----- From: Geoff Millikan [mailto:gmillikan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Friday, May 27, 2011 3:35 AM To: users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: RE: Apache 2.x configuration for high load servers #Increase this number. The zombies you're seeing #is every time an Apache child process dies. #The child will die @1500. We run at 20000 and are having no problems. MaxRequestsPerChild 1500 #We don't run as hot as you (we average 3 hits/sec and max at like 15 #in a 24 hour period) but here's our settings: StartServers 70 MinSpareServers 70 ServerLimit 364 MaxClients 364 MaxRequestsPerChild 20000 #Shrink the size of the response header: ServerTokens Prod #Defiantly want keepalive on, it will help page load time for customers. #Everything else looks good. Keepalive is on #We have this turned on but we use server side includes SSI and we cache. UseCanonicalName On You have way too many modules enabled. You need user_dir module? Every module loaded takes up RAM. You should be able to get the "RES" RAM use per process down to under 20 MB unless you're doing something funky. If you're finding that 80% of the time you're running 100 processes, then start that many and keep that many going. We found that the process that starts up new children takes too long and it was causing pages to hang while Apache started up new children. So just start as many as you need, even if a lot of them are just idle. Couple of other tips: 1. Turn off the "access time" atime on your file system. This will speed disk access a lot. 2. Using mod_file_cache on a big site is hard to get everyone on board for. It's complicated and it's easy to cache the wrong stuff. However, with a bit of pain, there is a lot of gain to be had there in terms of reduced work load on the server and thus faster page load times. Suggest you bite the bullet and do it. BTW, the CentOS rpm of Apache doesn't work with mod_file_Cahce. Lots of bugs. So have to compile from source on this. We're on CentOS 5 too. Lots of people will suggest the Worker MPM due to it's lower RAM usage however we haven't done it as the PHP web site speaks so strongly against it. Best, Geoff Millikan @ http://www.t1shopper.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- The official User-To-User support forum of the Apache HTTP Server Project. See <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/userslist.html> for more info. To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx " from the digest: users-digest-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx --------------------------------------------------------------------- The official User-To-User support forum of the Apache HTTP Server Project. See <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/userslist.html> for more info. To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx " from the digest: users-digest-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx