Apache performance tuning fun
Yesterday I decided to change the Apache Multiprocessing Module (MPM) from prefork to pthread. The pthread module performs much better (although I only suffer Apache performance problems when I bump up against the MaxClients settings).
Upgrading was easy, all I needed to do was apt-get install apache2-mpm-perchild and it all seemed fine. Unfortunately on testing it turned out that the forums weren’t working because the PHP module had been removed.
I dug into it and in the view of the Debian packagers (who are usually right!) PHP4 has problems with the pthread MPM. So for now I’ve decided to go back to the old prefork MPM.
In the future when I have a dedicated image web server I’ll make sure that it is using the fast MPM but I guess that for the other server Apache makes so little difference to the performance that it’s just not worth bothering about.