Server performance and configuration
The topics we have discussed so far focus on code changes, or introducing other services to reduce the work our web server needs to do. Our site runs on services which are highly configurable in their own right, including Apache, MySQL and PHP—all of which can be configured and tuned for performance using their various configuration files.
Apache
Our Apache configuration file (name and location depend on the setup of the server) contain settings relating to how many connections can be accepted, timeout period, and so on.
The maximum number of clients which can connect to the server at any one time is set by the MaxClient Directive
in the configuration file; this can be increased to allow more connections to the server, provided we have sufficient resources to allow this of course. More information is available at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mpm_common.html#maxclients.
The length of time a process can take before Apache times out the request is...
