Apache, Configuring

Revision as of 07:49, 20 October 2005

Apache 2 Configuration

If you've got a busy webserver, you'll soon find yourself looking at tweaking the Apache configuration to get more. As it is, most Apache installs are configured for testing / development vs production use.

MPM

By default, the httpd.conf has MPM specific settings for all possible MPM choices. However, since this choice is made at compile-time, all but one of these MPM specific can be safely removed. The default (and usually the recommended) MPM is prefork.

##
## Server-Pool Size Regulation (MPM specific)
##

KeepAlives

The KeepAlives directive is enabled by default; to quote from the Apache documentation:

The Keep-Alive extension to HTTP/1.0 and the persistent connection feature of 
HTTP/1.1 provide long-lived HTTP sessions which allow multiple requests to be 
sent over the same TCP connection. In some cases this has been shown to result
in an almost 50% speedup in latency times for HTML documents with many images. 

Which is a good thing, if you want fast pages and have a strong server to handle it. If you're more concerned with availability than speed, or are running Apache on a less-than-stellar machine, you may get better performance (cpu/processor-wise, at least,) by turning KeepAlives off:

Default:

KeepAlives On

Tweaked:

KeepAlives Off