Apache2 Serving Pages Extremely Slowly - Please view server-status

Question

For the last week, sites on my VPS have been loading extremely slowly, sometimes even timing out. Could you please take a look at my Apache2 'server-status' output and let me know if you see anything interesting? I see a lot of "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" requests where the client is localhost (127.0.0.1). I really have no idea what is going on.

http://news.sweetboxing.com/server-status

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Nick.

For first reply:

apache2.conf extract:

Timeout 300

#
# KeepAlive: Whether or not to allow persistent connections (more than
# one request per connection). Set to "Off" to deactivate.
#
KeepAlive On

#
# MaxKeepAliveRequests: The maximum number of requests to allow
# during a persistent connection. Set to 0 to allow an unlimited amount.
# We recommend you leave this number high, for maximum performance.
#
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100

#
# KeepAliveTimeout: Number of seconds to wait for the next request from the
# same client on the same connection.
#
KeepAliveTimeout 2

##
## Server-Pool Size Regulation (MPM specific)
##

# prefork MPM
# StartServers: number of server processes to start
# MinSpareServers: minimum number of server processes which are kept spare
# MaxSpareServers: maximum number of server processes which are kept spare
# MaxClients: maximum number of server processes allowed to start
# MaxRequestsPerChild: maximum number of requests a server process serves

StartServers       1
MinSpareServers    1
MaxSpareServers    5
MaxClients        40
    MaxRequestsPerChild   500


# worker MPM
# StartServers: initial number of server processes to start
# MaxClients: maximum number of simultaneous client connections
# MinSpareThreads: minimum number of worker threads which are kept spare
# MaxSpareThreads: maximum number of worker threads which are kept spare
# ThreadsPerChild: constant number of worker threads in each server process
# MaxRequestsPerChild: maximum number of requests a server process serves

StartServers       1
MaxClients        40
MinSpareThreads    1
MaxSpareThreads    4
    ThreadsPerChild      25
    MaxRequestsPerChild   500

Answer 1

Are you running cPanel on your setup? The "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" is used by cPanel to check the status of the server, but shouldn't in itself be causing any additional load on the server so my guess is that there is something else and without additional information from you its very hard to suggest something else.

When checking your status page aswell as browsing http://www.sweetboxing.com and http://www.sweetmma.com it replies fast to me. The /server-status page doesn't indicate any currently high load either, so right now its probably very calm for you too?

You usually have to observe the server while the pages load slowly to get a better picture of what the issue is, if Apache is configured to allow too few connections, if you are running out of memory under high usage. Maybe you were under attack or you could just have had someone link something popular from your site? A combination of reading logs in hindsight aswell as actively monitoring the performance while something happens usually gives you more details.

Edit 1:

I really think that your low values of this block is what causes you to sometimes have queues and low performance. Try something like this:

<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
StartServers 10
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 5
MaxClients 100
ServerLimit 100
MaxRequestsPerChild 100
</IfModule>