Apache tuning - Multiple WordPress installations - wordpress

I'm running Apache2 server with multiple WordPress installations for my customers. I'm using FCGI-PHP & suexec. Server is dedicated 16GB RAM, Intel i5 2,6GHZ 4 cores. Server MPM: Worker. Network 100mbs.
I allow my WordPress users to upload files up to 100MB.
I have mod_pagespeed and mod_bw enabled. I have set bandwidth limit for each virtualhost to 1mbs.
I'd like to hear some tips how to tune Apache to that kind of use. I'm pretty new with dedicated servers. I have webmin installed but I don't have any analyzing app installed. What would be good moniter app to monitor server maybe with web browser? Also I'd like to hear how to setup my apache2.conf and cfgi-conf. Current is now:
Timeout 720
KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 250
KeepAliveTimeout 5
<IfModule mpm_worker_module>
StartServers 10
MinSpareThreads 15
MaxSpareThreads 75
ThreadLimit 128
ThreadsPerChild 100
MaxClients 200
MaxRequestsPerChild 10000
</IfModule>
FCGI configuration is:
<IfModule mod_fcgid.c>
AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi
FcgidMinProcessesPerClass 0
FcgidMaxProcessesPerClass 14
FcgidMaxProcesses 250
FcgidIdleTimeout 60
FcgidProcessLifeTime 720
FcgidIdleScanInterval 20
FcgidConnectTimeout 720
FcgidMaxRequestLen 131072000
</IfModule>
I'd be very happy if you could give me some tips/help. Thank you very much!

I have http://newrelic.com/ on all my servers.
For Apache tuning this script gives hints for configuration
https://github.com/gusmaskowitz/apachebuddy.pl
For MySQL tuning this script gives hints for configuration
https://raw.github.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl/master/mysqltuner.pl
You have more than enough available memory to run some heavy WordPress sites.
So I would use these tools and decide where to go from there.

Related

httpd using high amount of memory?

On a t3.small Amazon EC instance, I'm running two wordpress websites. One is running WooCommerce and the other is just a plain Wordpress with the Avada theme.
After editing a few pages, I notice the memory usage going up and up and usually after about an hour, the server stops responding (out of memory and possible due to heavy swapping).
Running the following command for example shows;
ps aux | grep 'httpd' | awk '{print $6/1024 " MB";}'
15.1328 MB
416.688 MB
527.73 MB
372.43 MB
543.508 MB
2.45703 MB
The apache server is running prefork with the following config;
<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
StartServers 5
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 10
MaxRequestWorkers 10
MaxConnectionsPerChild 1000
</IfModule>
Any hints on how to improve this would be greatly appreciated. thank you
Turned out, my home page had a few images that were not loading via https which caused them to keep a few connections timing out which caused a high amount of connections to stay open.

replace apache and mod_weblogic with nginx and what?

I have a two nodes WebLogic (and a positively ancient version of WebLogic to boot) cluster that I plan to retire where WebLogic will be replaced by WildFly and Apache with Nginx. The problem I am facing right now is how to replace mod_weblogic from the Apache configuration:
<IfModule mod_weblogic.c>
WebLogicHost 192.168.0.1
WebLogicPort 7003
</IfModule>
<LocationMatch "/services/.*/(buy|sell|status)">
SetHandler weblogic-handler
WebLogicCluster 192.168.0.1:7003,192.168.0.2:7003
PathTrim /services
PathPrepend /requestprocessor
WLIOTimeoutSecs 600
</LocationMatch>
In this example, from what I understand, provides mod_weblogic load balancing between the two nodes, right? I have to admit that I have no idea how this module works, only that I am about to replace it… :-)
How can I achieve the same result with Nginx and WildFly?
I found a guide on the Nginx website about load balancing ( https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/deployment-guides/jboss-load-balancing-nginx-plus/) and I guess the big question is if there is anything in the functionality of mod_weblogic that I am missing or if doing as the guide suggests will provide the desired result?
You can do load balancing with a lot of tools now. for example haproxy
http://biemond.blogspot.com/2010/04/high-availability-load-balancer-for.html
or nginx https://www.nginx.com/blog/load-balance-oracle-weblogic-server/
or apache https://theheat.dk/blog/?p=916
or varnish https://varnish-cache.org/
they all have similar abilities. as far as I know, now mod_weblogic does not have any specialty other then nginx or varnish or haproxy. apache proxy module can be hard to configure but still does the job.
long time ago there was no nginx or varnish there people start using mod_weblogic. it was a default product for weblogic. now we have all other options. you just need to test and fine-tune your choice.

PHP-FPM using 40% CPU for a Single Request

(I googled and searched this forum for hours, found some topics, but none of them worked for me)
I'm using Wordpress with: Varnish + Nginx + PHP-FPM + APC + W3 Total Cache + PageSpeed.
As I'm using Varnish, first time I call www.mysite.com it use just 10% of CPU. Calling the second time, it will be cached. The problem is passing request parameter in URL.
For just 1 request (www.mysite.com?1=1) it shows in top:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
7609 nginx 20 0 438m 41m 28m S 11.6 7.0 0:00.35 php-fpm
7606 nginx 20 0 437m 39m 26m S 10.3 6.7 0:00.31 php-fpm
After the page is fully loaded, these processes above are still active. And after 2 seconds, they are replaced by another 2 php-fpm processes(below), which are active for 3 seconds.
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
7665 nginx 20 0 444m 47m 28m S 20.9 7.9 0:00.69 php-fpm
7668 nginx 20 0 444m 46m 28m R 20.9 7.9 0:00.63 php-fpm
40% CPU usage just for 1 request not cached!
Strange things:
CPU usage is higher after the page was loaded
When I purged the cache (W3 and Varnish), it take just 10% of CPU to load a not cached page
This high CPU usage just happend passing request parameter or in Wordpress Admin
When I try to do 10 request(pressing F5 key 10x), the server stop serving and in php-fpm log appears:
WARNING: [pool www] server reached max_children setting (10), consider raising it
I raised that value to 20, same problem.
I'm using pm=ondemand (pm.max_children=10 and pm.max_requests=500).
Inittialy I was using pm=dynamic (pm.max_children=10, pm.start_servers=1, pm.min_spare_servers=1, pm.min_spare_servers=2, pm.max_requests=500) and it happened the same problem.
Anyone could help, plz? Any help would be appreciated!
PS:
APC is ON (98% Hits, 2% Misses)
Server is Amazon Micro (613MB RAM)
PHP 5.3.26 (fpm-fcgi)
Linux version 3.4.48-45.46.amzn1.x86_64 Red Hat 4.6.3-2 (I think it's based on CentOS 5)
First reduce the stack of caches. Why using varnish which serves pages from memory when you're using w3 cache already which serves from memory as well?
W3cache is CPU intensive! It does not just cache items but also compresses, minifies and merges files on the fly.
You got a total of 512MB of memory on your machine which is not a lot, also your CPU power is less than a modern smartphone has. Memory access is extremely slow compared to a root server because of the xen virtualization layer - That's why less is more.
Make sure w3cache is properly set up so it actually caches items, then warmup your cache and you should be fine.
Have a look at Googles nginx pagespeed module https://github.com/pagespeed/ngx_pagespeed, it can do the same thing w3cache does, just much more efficient because it happens in the webserver, not in PHP
Nginx can also directly serve from memcached http://www.kingletas.com/2012/08/full-page-cache-with-nginx-and-memcache.html (example article, might need some more investigation)
Problem solved!
For those who are having the same problem:
Check Varnish configuration;
Check your Wordpress's plugin;
1) In my case, TTL was not configured in Varnish, so nothing was being cached.
This config worked for me:
sub vcl_fetch {
if (!(req.url ~ "wp-(login|admin)")) {
unset beresp.http.set-cookie;
set beresp.ttl = 48h;
}
}
2) The high CPU usage AFTER page loads, was caused by a Wordpress plugin called: "Scroll Triggered Box".
It was doing some AJAX after page has loaded. I disabled that plugin and high load stopped.
There are two factors at play here:
You are using micro instance which has a burstable CPU profile. It can burst up to 2 ECU's then be limited to much less than 1 (Some estimates put this at around 0.1 - 0.2 ECU's)
While logged in as an admin, wordpress caching plugins often bypass or reduce caching. W3 should allow you to switch this if you want caching on all the time.

Why every request is being processed by PHP-FPM? (even if I'm using Cache)

I'm running Wordpress with: Nginx + PHP-FPM + APC + W3 Total Cache + PageSpeed.
After 3 days researching and configuring, I succeeded to configure.
Running "top" and hitting some cached pages, it shows:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
13387 nginx 20 0 472m 11m 4664 S 12.3 2.0 0:46.55 nginx
17577 nginx 20 0 443m 47m 29m S 0.7 8.0 0:42.88 php-fpm
17591 nginx 20 0 438m 43m 29m S 0.7 7.2 0:42.59 php-fpm
1486 mysql 20 0 851m 21m 4832 S 0.3 3.7 1:24.71 mysqld
17907 nginx 20 0 438m 48m 34m S 0.3 8.1 0:36.78 php-fpm
18065 nginx 20 0 442m 47m 29m S 0.3 8.0 0:33.49 php-fpm
18543 nginx 20 0 445m 63m 42m S 0.3 10.6 0:22.94 php-fpm
21125 root 20 0 15012 1148 868 R 0.3 0.2 0:00.86 top
1 root 20 0 19356 1388 1136 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.74 init
1) Why every request is being processed by PHP-PFM? Shouldn't W3 Total Cache supposed to prevent the request from been processed by PHP-FPM?
I know that my page is being cached because every page return in the end of HTML:
<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/
Page Caching using disk: enhanced
2) If I install Varnish in front of Nginx, will it stop the request from being processed by PHP-FPM? (Performance will increase? I'm using a Micro Ec2, Ram = 613MB)
PS: The response header is returning "Cache-Control: max-age=0, no-cache" from server. I don't know if this influence W3 Caching.
My specs:
Amazon Micro EC2
Linux version 3.4.48-45.46.amzn1.x86_64 Red Hat 4.6.3-2 (I think it's based on CentOS 5)
PHP 5.3.26 (fpm-fcgi)
I'm not aware of how this w3 total cache works, but let me state to you some facts,
first of all on the nginx level, any php page must hit the php engine, because that's probably what your try_files tells the nginx to do, if w3 total cache has some sort of html cache of the pages, then without some changes to nginx config you will still hit the php even if the cache existed. And if the cache is not really in a form of html then probably the php engine checks for the existence of the page then decides whether to rebuild the page or serve the cached one instead, so you definitely need php to run, the difference is that it won't hit the database and it won't do any processing, just serving the cached page instead.
second question, varnish, yes varnish would actually be good, it would spare you the need of a cache plugin, but then you need to make sure that wordpress knows when to ask varnish to purge the cached pages, the structure of the server would be user -> varnish -> nginx -> php, if varnish has a cached page or assets (css,js,etc) it would serve it directly without passing the request to nginx, I've tried it on a website and the response times of a cached page definitely improved, even when i did a ctrl+f5 to request the whole page without cache it still returned very fast as if the page was just a plain html page.
You'll still need to mess around with the varnish config, or at least that's what i did, because it needs a little bit of learning, but so far all I did was some copy and pasting from blogs and stuff and it worked just fine with me.
I installed Varnish in front of my server, but again, it was being processed by PHP-FPM.
The problem was the lacking of slash at the end of the URL.
In Wordpress, a page is a directory, so it respond as www.mysite.com/page1/.
The point is when you hit www.mysite.com/page1 (without the slash), Nginx have to redirect to www.mysite.com/page1/ (with slash), and by doing this, it uses PHP-FPM.
After putting the slash at the end of all links in my site, the redirect was not done, and all of my page was not processed by PHP-FPM.

Can't connect to Wordpress SVN server to update repository

Okay, for some reason this morning, I am unable to connect to the Wordpress SVN repository and execute basic svn commands (e.g. checkout, update).
Here's an example of what's happening:
$ svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/3.3/
# Adds a bunch of files...
svn: warning: Error handling externals definition for '3.3/wp-content/plugins/akismet':
svn: warning: PROPFIND of '/!svn/vcc/default': could not connect to server (http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org)
Checked out revision 19597.
$ cd 3.3
$ svn update
svn: OPTIONS of 'http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/3.3': could not connect to server (http://svn.automattic.com)
Yet, when I perform these same commands on a development server I have (a Linode VPS) it works fine.
I've google around about this quite a bit, and found pages like these:
http://vsingleton.blogspot.com/2008/04/svn-propfind-request-failed-on.html
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/cant-connect-to-the-pluginssvnwordpress-server
A lot of these articles say something to effect of, it's your proxy server. Well, I'm not behind a proxy server:
http://whatismyipaddress.com/proxy-check
Proxy server not detected.
IP 24.21.xxxx.xxx
rDNS FALSE
WIMIA Test FALSE
TOR Test FALSE
Loc Test FALSE
Header Test FALSE
DNSBL Test FALSE
Just a regular old Comcast home internet connection.
Also, I can browse the wordpress SVN repository just fine via my browser.
Anyhow, I'm sort of at a dead end here, and I guess I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions as to how to either solve the issue or work around it? I tried setting up an forward proxy server on the Apache installation I have running on that dev server and then updating my ~/.subversion/server file, but that didn't work or I configured something wrong.
Well, if anyone has any brilliant ideas or explanations, I'd love to hear them...
Update
I had a co-worker test this out on his home connection -- he uses Comcast as well. He got the same error as I did. So it appears to be some Comcast-related issue specific to the Wordpress svn repository. I was able to checkout other public repositories via http (e.g. from Google Code) just fine.
I ran a series of tests and I could not find any hidden proxies or cache servers between me and the repository.
I did run traceroute per Lazy Badgers suggestion, and here's what I got:
$ traceroute svn.automattic.com
traceroute to svn.automattic.com (72.233.56.196), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 0.659 ms 0.292 ms 0.185 ms
2 * * *
3 te-5-7-ur01.hollywood.or.bverton.comcast.net (68.85.150.225) 8.792 ms 8.309 ms 9.054 ms
4 xe-3-1-0-0-ar03.beaverton.or.bverton.comcast.net (68.87.216.33) 14.354 ms 24.859 ms 8.753 ms
5 pos-3-8-0-0-cr01.sacramento.ca.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.95.117) 21.869 ms
pos-3-1-0-0-cr01.sacramento.ca.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.95.113) 21.791 ms
pos-3-0-0-0-cr01.sacramento.ca.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.95.109) 22.983 ms
6 pos-0-7-0-0-cr01.sanjose.ca.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.85.46) 23.682 ms 25.043 ms 24.675 ms
7 xe-10-3-0.edge1.sanjose1.level3.net (4.71.118.5) 61.048 ms 23.986 ms 24.221 ms
8 vlan80.csw3.sanjose1.level3.net (4.69.152.190) 25.257 ms 25.648 ms
vlan90.csw4.sanjose1.level3.net (4.69.152.254) 24.310 ms
9 ae-82-82.ebr2.sanjose1.level3.net (4.69.153.25) 24.870 ms
ae-92-92.ebr2.sanjose1.level3.net (4.69.153.29) 25.371 ms
ae-91-91.ebr1.sanjose1.level3.net (4.69.153.13) 24.744 ms
10 ae-34-34.ebr4.sanjose1.level3.net (4.69.153.34) 36.011 ms 25.975 ms 36.053 ms
11 ae-5-5.ebr2.sanjose5.level3.net (4.69.148.141) 25.236 ms 25.307 ms 25.305 ms
12 ae-6-6.ebr2.losangeles1.level3.net (4.69.148.201) 31.299 ms 34.076 ms 33.401 ms
13 ae-3-3.ebr3.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.132.78) 59.012 ms 58.604 ms 60.576 ms
14 ae-83-83.csw3.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.151.157) 59.708 ms 65.724 ms
ae-73-73.csw2.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.151.145) 60.383 ms
15 ae-42-90.car2.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.145.196) 60.636 ms
ae-22-70.car2.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.145.68) 59.572 ms 59.758 ms
16 databank-ho.car2.dallas1.level3.net (4.71.170.2) 58.711 ms 59.994 ms 60.561 ms
I don't know if that's unusual or anything. I tried the same on my dev sever and the result looked mostly similar, save for line 2 with the * * *.
I successfully configured a forward proxy on my dev server so I've hacked together a solution for now, but I still don't quite understand what is afoot...
Update 2
In response to a question, here's how I configured things to use my dev server as a proxy for the time being.
First, I configured apache on my dev server to run as a proxy. Make sure these directives are somewhere in your Apache configuration file chain (httpd.conf, vhosts.d directory, etc.):
Listen 8080
<VirtualHost _default_:8080>
ProxyRequests On
ProxyVia On
ProxyPreserveHost On
<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
</Proxy>
</VirtualHost>
This assumes you have a working Apache set up on a development server somewhere (I would definitely not use this on a production server) with mod_proxy installed. Port 8080 is arbitrary. Basically for an unmatched virtual host (i.e. any request that doesn't match your other hosts you have set up) it will turn proxy on and proxy the request through. Change "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" to your own IP address.
Now you have to change the server setting in your subversion config file.
In this file:
~/.subversion/servers
Find this section:
[global]
# http-proxy-exceptions = *.exception.com, www.internal-site.org
# http-proxy-host = proxy1.some-domain-name.com
# http-proxy-port = 80
# http-proxy-username = defaultusername
# http-proxy-password = defaultpassword
# http-compression = no
# http-auth-types = basic;digest;negotiate
# No http-timeout, so just use the builtin default.
# No neon-debug-mask, so neon debugging is disabled.
# ssl-authority-files = /path/to/CAcert.pem;/path/to/CAcert2.pem
Uncomment out http-proxy-host and http-proxy-port. For host use a spare domain name you have mapped to your development server or presumably you could just use your server IP. Then set the port to 8080 or whatever you used.
This should route all subversion http requests via your proxy you just set up. It doesn't affect svn or svn+ssh requests.
This was my quick hack, your mileage may vary, this might be totally insecure or broken, etc.
I have Comcast business both at my home office & the corporate office.
BOTH FAIL TO CONNECT TO THE REPO ON COMCAST.
However, I never have a problem if I go over the Windstream T1 or connect via our live server on multiple backbones.
Comcast appears to be "traffic shaping" and/or monitoring business class traffic and breaking the Internet!
Nice job Comcast!
If you don't have an alternate connection they you may need to use a proxy service and then send Comcast a nasty email about their network filtering.

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