On Jun 14, 2:40 pm, setesting...@gmail.com wrote:
> On 6$B7n(B14$BF|(B, $B2<8a(B6$B;~(B15$BJ,(B, "C. (http://symcbean.blogspot.com/)"
>
> <colin.mckin...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Jun 14, 7:31 am, setesting...@gmail.com wrote:
> > 300 is not a lot of clients. Unless you mean that you normally have
> > 300 active connections to the webserver.
>
> ps ax | grep httpd | wc -l
>
> >> 286

You have about 300 httpd servers running at any one - time - this is
FAR from the same thing as 300 users OR 300 concurrent requests. Since
you think that's an answer to the question, I'm guessing you haven't
even done any basic tuning of your apache.

>
> and an example of running httpd process:
>
> >> 31594 web 15 0 142m 16m 8472 S 0 0.3 12:02.94 httpd
>

Without seeing the headers or knowing which ps was run with what
options, it's hard to tell what I'm looking at here, I would expect
the %CPU and %mem to be listed in most formats, so I suspect that this
is using 0.3% of the available memory - which suggests that your
system could cope (memory wise) with a lot more then 300 concurrent
connections. What OS are you running on? Do you see any signs of
swapping or even paging?

> I believe it is currently using 16M of memory per httpd process (I am
> running Apache 1.3, multi process mode)
>
> I am thinking about using fastcgi as not all these 286 httpd process
> need to use php at every instance? (E.g. create a pool of fast cgi
> php , say 100 process, and let them share)

mod_php will (and most likely IS) happily live in COW TXT segment -
i.e. there will be only one copy in memory, referenced mulitple times.
The usage reported in ps is how much memory would be used if one AND
ONLY ONE instance of apache was running.

Forget about using FastCGI - you're just going to end up using more
memory and running slower.

Start by tuning your apache config (there are lots of good books
available) and add a compressed output handler (like mod_gzip) then
install a PHP cache, then think about optimizing any database and file
I/O by PHP.

C.