I have an older desktop running debian using the perfect server setup. It's not much hardware wise but it does its job. It is a Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz with 4GB RAM (maxed out) and 2 80GB SATA drives. I know there is not much improvement I can do hardware wise (without replacing for a whole new computer) as I am at the limits of the system. So I am looking into any software tweaks I can to maximize what I have. I am a little lost in interpreting the results I get though. for example with top and free. Code: top - 06:20:26 up 21 days, 7:58, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.06, 0.01 Tasks: 124 total, 1 running, 123 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.2%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.8%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 3497104k total, 3327356k used, 169748k free, 231324k buffers Swap: 5308980k total, 652k used, 5308328k free, 2311064k cached Code: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3497104 3327596 169508 0 231324 2311064 -/+ buffers/cache: 785208 2711896 Swap: 5308980 652 5308328 So what do you guys think? I know load is good and I have never seen it very high at all. I may be able to disable some services to reduce memory usage, or do some apache / mysql tweaking. Yes I have done lots of searching and reading for linux performance tuning. But still don't quite know where to go with it. So my question to you guys is "What would you do?" Thanks all.
I'd try this first: http://www.howtoforge.com/configuring_apache_for_maximum_performance Afterwards, you can try to tune MySQL.
Also, you could install a PHP opcode cacher, such as eAccelerator, Xcache, or APC. That should help a lot.
htop results Here's what I have from htop on a Saturday evening. It's not too bad I think. I actually already have APC installed as I was reading into this post by crypted CPU load locks up box. Apache or MYSQL related. I will actually be doing a hardware upgrade soon, just like tweaking things as much as possible. I also tried out the Google Mod Pagespeed module but when it was enabled, for some reason it actually caused problems with roundcube, which is the whole purpose of this box. Thanks again guys, I will create another post with questions on my server upgrade.
