Apache configuration has a major affect on your Linode’s performance. The easiest way to increase server performance is to turn off unneeded modules. This guide covers Apache modules, information on which modules to turn off, and other Apache performance tuning options.

I had to handle high traffic loads in my career and I fought with down-time, not used memory and a lot of trouble in my past. In this article I want to give a step-by-step guide to apache2 performance settings, which is a concentrated result of a lot of reading and trying.

At the end of last year, this blog was migrated to a new server, hosted by DigitalOcean. The old server ran on Apache but on the new server I wanted to try out the LEMP One-click application. LEMP stands for Linux, NGINX (say: en-juhn-ex), MySQL, PHP.

Recently, I’ve spent a huge amount of time working on Apache and PHP-FPM in order to allow for a threaded Apache MPM whilst still using PHP and virtual hosts (vhosts). As this article is going to be rather lengthy, I’m going to split it up into sections below.

NOTE: .htaccess files are for people that do not have rights to edit the main server configuration file. They are intrinsically slower and more complicated than using the main config. Please see the howto in the httpd documentation for further details.