Optimize WHM for single website dedicated server

My thoughts would be that if you are just wanting to run apache, php and mysql and only one site, why would you want to use cPanel? cPanel is geared for hosting multiple sites. If you want to save memory and resources, go without a control panel. This way you only install the services that you require/need.

 

I am going to go with ChrisRHS on this ....

I don't see any reason for running WHM or Cpanel if you are only running a single site other than maybe you don't know how to manually manage a server I am guessing may be the case here?

If the above assumption is correct, you only have to ask and I would be glad to give you a hand manually setting up Apache, PHP, Bind, and MySQL to get your server up and running without Cpanel / WHM.

Since you do have Cpanel / WHM installed, you do have a few options available to you that would not be typically employed under normal circumstances but might actually help you performance wise since you mentioned that your site is a single "high traffic" site ...

Instead of running a single site, you could actually break your site down into a whole bunch of smaller accounts each handling different areas of your site and since those are spawned by different server handlers, some of your software and process loads can be divided even though you are still on the same physical server. The same technique can be used to mirror sites across different IPs or netcards if your server supports it.

Also wouldn't hurt to add caching capabilities to Apache if you don't already have that turned on at this point.

Either way, would be glad to help. Contact me by private message since I don't always catch replies in every thread on here.

 

By default, cPanel/WHM does not impose any resource restraints on websites (unless you're talking about something like enforcing file system permissions). However, some restraints can be configured via WHM if they are desired.

 

Cpanel doesn't put any "constraints" per say but it does have substantially high overhead just from all it's various components and connections that make it a lot more resource intensive than most other platforms or obviously a barebones LAMP configuration.

Normally that is a non-issue but it sounds like this user needs to squeeze out every possible resource.

If you are using a round robin setup, that will help to an extent but you might run into issues if you don't have your DNS and MySQL clustered (if you have any dynamic content on your site). Cpanel support DNS clustering natively but MySQL will require some manual configurations.

For this type of configuration, I usually allocate a front end gateway server with nothing but a caching reverse proxy loaded to direct traffic to round robin type servers behind the reverse proxy. This kills any incomplete or bad requests and reduces loads by caching in advance common content for requests and further reduces loads by tasking connections between multiple servers. Now with this setup, you could load MySQL on the gateway server and have the round robin web servers pull from that to simply things.

There are a number of programs that are pretty good for this sort of thing
and I have a lot of experience with each of them but anyway if you configure this correctly, each of your servers should be able to handle about 1,000 times their normal connection request limits and substantially handle a massive amount of more traffic reliably.

I should be around most of the morning this morning if you want to chat any. I have a few ideas on how to drastically increase your site's availability to high traffic loads utilizing your existing servers plus a a few other options on the table.