I've been using mysql tuner and it has really helped with the performance of my machine so now I am wondering is there something like that for Apache? I've searched around and found some tutorials on manual tune ups but nothing that actually monitors and makes suggestions.

I am using centOS 6.3

Thats because each apache config is going to be different. I used to hate getting these sort of tickets from customers, asking us to optimize apache and mysql so their site would run faster.

The real issue is usually the site itself and its lack of optimization. If you are experiencing slow site performance run it through an analyzer like www.websiteoptimization.com/analyze/. You can install some caching and change some of your directives in Apache but for the most part there isn't much "optimization" that is going to make your site magically start to run faster. MySQL does have quite a bit more that you can optimize based upon your queries.


I hope this info helps, if not be more specific on what you are wanting to "optimize" in Apache and why.

sorry should have added more specifics to start with.

I have around 100 web sites on my dedicated machine, I am running PLESK 11 and the "Health Service" often reports that the amount of CPU apache is using is high. When I view top I can see all the httpd threads but that doesn't tell me much. I would like to be able to find out what each thread is doing and if there are any trouble areas. Since I have many sites that are running CMS's or have custom code it's possible someone is running something that is either poorly coded or just inefficient. I am just not sure where to begin.

Machine has:
GenuineIntel, Intel(R) Xeon(R)CPU X3450 @ 2.67GHz
8 gigs RAM

Just read that PLESK doesn't take the number of cores into account so my 25% CPU usage is actually 25/4 which is a great number.

It's going to be more than likely caused by teh sites themselves, an out of the box Joomla install takes over 20 seconds to fully load on any high speed connection and generates over 100 HTTP requests for just the main page with no content on it.

You can enable the mysql slow query log as this is actually going to help you out, usually in these cases its a wordpress or some other piece of code that queries a mysql db causing hundreds of thousands of rows to be examined. It's just the way the plugins/queries are written.

Just take a look at the huge performance complaints of the wordpress "yarpp" plugin.


I would run each of the sites through the web site analyzer as that will tell you how much data is being generated from the http requests and give you suggestions to compress or fix them, enable the mysql slow query log and see if anything reports there.

you can also run the commands "httpd status" and "httpd fullstatus" to get a better idea of the amount of requests being processed. Apahce doesn't break these out by vhost name so its a bit tough to figure out which one is causing a huge amount of requests if there is any.