Assessing server load and operation.

[Brenton]

Hi

I'm running a Ubuntu 5.10 server configured using the ISP-Server Setup - Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy Badger". Everything seems to be running well, I'm hosting 29 web sites with mail users. As with all things Open Source, I now want to start tweaking the server to ensure optimal performance.

So this is my question, what is the best way to monitor the server?

I'm inclined to just use top and see how things are going. Is there a better way (I know this is a very loaded question) to monitor services and to tweak them? Is there a good how-to out there that somebody can recommend? I've googled and have found a ton of stuff, so asking here is just a way to see if I'm on the right track.

top output: (just the top bit)

top - 03:19:13 up 2 days, 15:11, 1 user, load average: 0.01, 0.00, 0.00
Tasks: 87 total, 2 running, 85 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.7% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.0% id, 0.3% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 1019452k total, 848468k used, 170984k free, 150840k buffers
Swap: 2980016k total, 0k used, 2980016k free, 560480k cached


Mem used seems a bit high to me.

Brenton

[till]

Memory is often used in linux to cache data from harddisk, so it is normal that you have a high memory usage.

For optimizing your apavhe webserver, have a look here:

http://www.howtoforge.com/configuring_apache_for_maximum_performance