Squeezing more performance out of your Apache web server
You can learn a lot about your web server by strace‘ing it. Look at this, with my commentary in red:
www-vm1:~ # strace -p 5827 Process 5827 attached - interrupt to quit poll( ^^Your shell will sit here until this process receives a request [{fd=14, events=POLLIN, revents=POLLIN}], 1, 15000) = 1 read(14, "GET /modeling/images/dl-more.gif"..., 8000) = 677 ^^ A request for a plain old GIF file gettimeofday({1249652331, 82192}, NULL) = 0 stat("/home/local/data/httpd/www.eclipse.org/html/modeling/images/dl-more.gif", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0654, st_size=111, ...}) = 0 ^^ This is the absolute path to the file on disk. lstat("/home", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=192, ...}) = 0 lstat("/home/local", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=120, ...}) = 0 lstat("/home/local/data", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=72, ...}) = 0 lstat("/home/local/data/httpd", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=112, ...}) = 0 lstat("/home/local/data/httpd/www.eclipse.org", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=72, ...}) = 0 lstat("/home/local/data/httpd/www.eclipse.org/html", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0750, st_size=4808, ...}) = 0 ^^ Apache crawls the entire directory structure leading up to the file open("/home/local/data/httpd/www.eclipse.org/html/.htaccess", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) lstat("/home/local/data/httpd/www.eclipse.org/html/modeling", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0750, st_size=768, ...}) = 0 open("/home/local/data/httpd/www.eclipse.org/html/modeling/.htaccess", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) lstat("/home/local/data/httpd/www.eclipse.org/html/modeling/images", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=2056, ...}) = 0 open("/home/local/data/httpd/www.eclipse.org/html/modeling/images/.htaccess", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) ^^ Unless you have AllowOverride None, Apache will look for .htaccess files in each subdirectory of the DocumentRoot lstat("/home/local/data/httpd/www.eclipse.org/html/modeling/images/dl-more.gif", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0654, st_size=111, ...}) = 0 open("/home/local/data/httpd/www.eclipse.org/html/modeling/images/dl-more.gif", O_RDONLY) = 15 close(15) = 0 read(14, 0x555555a356b8, 8000) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable) writev(14, [{"HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified\r\nDate:"..., 170}], 1) = 170 ^^ All of that hard work to simply respond "Use your cached copy" to the client! write(10, "192.168.0.1 - - [07/Aug/2009:"..., 256) = 256 ^^ IP address changed to protect the innocent. poll( ^^ That request is complete, wait for another
All of this happens lightning fast. But do consider: Had the request been for a PHP file, all the above would have been repeated for each nested require(), require_once() and include() file. So the moral of this story is:
1. Don’t nest your DocumentRoot too deeply. We could trim /home/local/data/httpd/www.eclipse.org/html to save lots of CPU and disk cycles
2. Keep AllowOverride None to avoid accessing .htaccess files everywhere, unless you really need them. We’re investigating this seriously for www.eclipse.org.
3. Keep your web-visible directory structure short, too. http://www.eclipse.org/some/directory/structure/that/is/really/deep/and/nested/page.php will obviously generate lots of file stats (especially with AllowOverride)
4. If you use PHP files, only include what you need, otherwise you’re stat’ing (and reading, and possibly compiling) PHP files for nothing.
The more you reduce disk and CPU cycles for one request, the more your web server will scale.
Posted August 7th, 2009 by Denis Roy in category: Uncategorized
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Lars Vogel Says:
August 9th, 2009 at 3:01 am
Are you using in addition to strace any log file analyser for your Apache web server? If yes, what is your experience of the usage of the such a tool.