Thursday, April 26, 2012

monitoring apache server

A couple of days back, we were caught left-footed when our website slowed down to a crawl. The "standard practice" of restarting the process, restarting networking, even rebooting the server, did not help. Later, found that the problems were due to a 500 MB + flipbook uploaded the previous night, with a link on the home page.

Voxel support had pointed to
apache2ctl -t
as a possible first test, to see if apache was able to start with the config given. Did some googling and found this optimization and tuning page, which has some sections relevant for our static website also. In particular, the part where he says use
apache2ctl status
and
top d 1
to monitor apache's health.

These discussions also provide some tips on monitoring swapping, disk thrashing, io bottlenecks etc using vmstat, top, iotop and so on. This page has a good description of vmstat and free, what the displays mean etc.

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