Hello

I recently bought this Centos 5.10 VPS.

They already gave me pre-configured everything :

======
php -v
PHP 5.3.22 (cli) (built: Apr 2 2013 15:04:13)
Copyright (c) 1997-2013 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2013 Zend Technologies
with the ionCube PHP Loader v4.4.1, Copyright (c) 2002-2013, by ionCube Ltd., and
with Zend Guard Loader v3.3, Copyright (c) 1998-2010, by Zend Technologies
======

But I still feel like my blogs/shopping cart sites loading very slow.

I would like to clarify few things

1) I'm using Apache, should I upgrade my web server? ( I do not wish to go for high end expensive webservers)

2) Should I upgrade my PHP version?

3) Should I install any cache plugins? xcache/APC?

It would be great if someone guide guide me what are the modules/plugins/upgrades can improve my webserver speed.

Thank you in advance
John

In general, with VPS you kinda get what you pay for, what guaranteed processor and RAM do you have with it?

How much traffic are you getting?

Regarding your individual points:

1. I know that Apache will handle millions of page views a month just fine!
2. In general you should upgrade to whichever is the newest version of PHP that's supported, this can be either the official CentOS supported, or the highly regarded REMI repositories.
3. Unless you're doing a LOT of traffic to your site you aren't likely to notice much of an improvement with PHP cache.

1.5g RAM. 4 CPU cores. Unmetered bandwidth. Yea I like to upgrade php but some scripts works with 5.3. So can I maintain both? 5.4 will it improve speed?

You really don't want to be maintaining multiple versions of PHP in a production environment. The main reason for using newer versions of PHP is around the security/bug fix aspect rather than speed. You may find that more RAM will help. Does your VPS provider let you buy incremental add-ons?

My traffic is not much. Less than 10gb month but I need my sites to load very fast

You may find the "slowness" is due to your VPS sharing a common link to the outside world. You can have "unlimited bandwidth" which is really unlimited transfer, depending on your provider you could be sharing a single 100Mb link with any number of servers.

Try:

which downloads a 100Mb file and will give you an indication of the line speed you're getting.

Oh, and also, depending on your own location / bandwidth your site might seem slow to you but is fast for other people.

This is the speed

===
--2014-03-27 22:33:36-- http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com...ds/test100.zip
Resolving speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com... 208.43.102.250
Connecting to speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com|208.43.102.250|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104874307 (100M) [application/zip]
Saving to: `/dev/null'

100%[==================================================================================================== ==================================================>] 104,874,307 30.3M/s in 4.2s

2014-03-27 22:33:41 (23.8 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [104874307/104874307]
===

That's pretty respectable transfer time, so that's not a bottleneck.

yea but what i'm trying to do here is since this is a new VPS I want to configure the software properly before considering hardware upgrades such as RAM. Do you think I should consider litespeed etc? Is that a difficult process to migrate?

I honestly haven't used litespeed, I've only ever needed to use apache and I'm doing over 1M page displays a month.

Hi

I would run "top" in a putty terminal window and try to figure out where the bottleneck is. Keep it open and load some pages. Is it Apache or PHP processes using the CPU? Or maybe the database? Do you see a high waiting percentage? (Look at the number before %wa). Is it using swap?

Upgrading PHP and Apache doesn't help much. If you have lots of PHP code being included in every page, xcache/APC can help a lot. Changing web-server can help for static pages, but not much if the real problem is a slow backend.

Is it using MySql? The default server settings are very minimal. Increasing things like query_cache_size or key_buffer_size can do wonders.

In short, you have to figure out where the bottleneck is. What kind of software are you using?

Thank you for the reply

>> Is it using MySql? The default server settings are very minimal. Increasing things like query_cache_size or key_buffer_size can do wonders.

Is there any guide you can link me?

Mostly I'm using prestashop, smf, wordpress etc

Some links:

http://linuxsupportz.wordpress.com/2...ile-for-mysql/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6...-33ghz-1gb-ram