i tried pmap pgrep apache2 |grep total on ubuntu 10.4 running Apache and the o/p was like this:
total 47768K
total 48048K
total 48048K
total 48048K
total 48048K
total 48048K
does this means that each child process is taking 48 MB of RAM.Can you help me in finding the exact memory usage of each process.Expecting a reply
This is what I use for an approximation of the average httpd (substitute apache2 if on Debian distro) process size:
ps -ylC httpd --sort:rss | awk '{sum+=$8; ++n} END {print "Tot="sum"("n")";print "Avg="sum"/"n"="sum/n/1024"MB"}'
Like symcbean said you should take about 80% of the server's memory and divide it by the average process size to determine your upper limit MaxClients.
Cheers
ps --no-headers -ylC httpd | awk '{sum+=$8; ++n; if (!seen[$2]++) { uids+=1 }} END {printf("%-28s: %3i / %2i\n%-28s: %8.2f\n%-28s: %8.2f\n", "Apache processes / uids", n, uids, "Apache Memory Usage (MB)", sum/1024, "Average Proccess Size (MB)", sum/(n*1024))}'
You really don't want to know how complicated it is to work out what the actual memory footprint is.
Try plotting
ps -ef | grep httpd | wc -l
(number of httpd process)
against the first number in
free | grep 'buffers/cache'
(amount of memory used).
For varying load levels.
Remember that cache is important - if your webserver does any I/O then it the less cache you have the slower it will go. As a rough rule of thumb you want to set your maxclients to a value less than where 80% of your memory is used up.
I copy an pasted guys,
<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
StartServers 2
MinSpareServers 2
MaxSpareServers 5
MaxClients 200 #must be customized
ServerLimit 200 #must be customized
MaxRequestsPerChild 100
</IfModule>
KeepAlive Off
Some explanations are here:
StartServers – this is how many apache instances should start at the very beginning when apache is started. I set it to 2, and it works fine for me.
MinSpareServers – minimum number of spare servers that should be running waiting for potential requests. MinSpareServers=2 worked fine for me too.
MaxSpareServers – maximum number of spare servers that should be running waiting for potential requests, obviously >= MinSpareServers. In my working example MaxSpareServers=5.
MaxClients & ServerLimit. You can use this shell script to determine an average amount of memory consumed by one Apache process. In addition to that it’ll show total amount of memory consumed by all Apache processes. Just unzip and execute as follows:
wget http://cloudinservice.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ap.sh.zip
unzip ap.sh.zip
sh ap.sh
The output will be something like that:
Apache Memory Usage (MB): 1372.6
Average Proccess Size (MB): 54.9041
Try to execute it several times to compare the numbers; good results will be shown when server is under a heavy load. Now when you know average amount of memory consumed by Apache and total amount of memory of your server, it is possible to calculate value to be used for MaxClients setting. For example, if in average one your Apache process consumes 50MB RAM and server RAM is 2GB, and you want to leave 512MB for the rest processes, then:
MaxClients = (2GB – 512MB)/50MB = 30.72 ~ 30.
ServerLimit is, as I understand, the same thing, but while MaxClient setting can be changed on the go without a need to restart Apache, for new ServerLimit value to take effect Apache restart is required. MaxClients should always be <= ServerLimit. To make it easy, I set ServerLimit = MaxClients calculated by above formula.
I thank the girl that posted that on her website. jam
