Your Apache configuration settings have a major effect on your Linode’s performance. There are several tools that can be used to further inspect your Apache server’s performance and make informed decisions on how to begin tuning your Apache configurations.

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.