I finally have a fast server, any tips to take advantage of all this new found power?

[ChrisTNM]

I've never had a server like this and historically I've worked very hard to keep cpu and ram usage low. And while that's still important, a few of these settings here cause websites and web applications to load a bit more conservatively. Anyone here have any experience tinkering with more powerful servers? I'm wondering how far I can push this to get things nice and zippy and resource usage be damned (so to speak).

It's 40 CPU 32gb of RAM and SSDs. I can add more RAM but right now we never use more than 20gb or so. Just your typical LAMP server (cPanel).

 

[ZenHostingTravis]

Hi @ChrisTNM,

Do you use Cloudlinux? You can allocate more resources to some of the sites you host, if you do.

You could also tweak mySQL and Apache for performance or even experiment with different webservers such as Nginx (whcih cPanel now supports) and Litespeed (paid).

There is a plugin called Engintron that installs Nginx and I recall the author writes some good guides about how and what to tweak for performance.

You could also experiment with PHP handlers.

On important sites, you could use Cloudflare or BunnyCDN and experiment with settings.

Hope that helps.

 

[cPRex]

Adjusting MySQL and Apache was going to be my recommendation as well.

 

[ChrisTNM]

Thanks @ZenHostingTravis ! Yeah it's cloudlinux. Your list is what I've been doing already, so I guess that means I'm on the right track.

Have you had success with nginx on cpanel servers with lots of users? In my case the moment I enable it, hundreds of sites would fail because of the missing htaccess config and various other things. It just hasn't been worth it to swap over for large scale shared hosting environments.

@cPRex -- most of the available configuration changes in mysql are centered around memory usage and disk usage. Do you know of any changes that might affect CPU usage? In my experience it's usually down to how poorly the query is written. I just disabled the mysql governor in cloudlinux just see what it might look like and seems fine so far.

 

[cPRex]

By boosting the memory usage of MySQL with values like query_cache, you actually will increase the RAM usage on the machine and lower the CPU usage, because it is much quicker for the system to read data from RAM than from the hard disk.

 

[ZenHostingTravis]

Have you had success with nginx on cpanel servers with lots of users? In my case the moment I enable it, hundreds of sites would fail because of the missing htaccess config and various other things. It just hasn't been worth it to swap over for large scale shared hosting environments.

We haven't used nginx on our shared hosting servers but have switched from Apache to Litespeed and from Litespeed to Apache, in the past.

 

[cPRex]

Nginx doesn't play nice with .htaccess. There are some more details on this here:

Like Apache: .htaccess | NGINX

You might think that you want to use .htaccess in your NGINX configuration, but you don't. Here's why.

www.nginx.com