http://www.whylinuxisbetter.net/

I was in a mall today and saw a line 20 deep in the food court for Taco Bell. People gotta eat, and they need their latest and greatest software too. I’m sure the net is lagging behind the economy, but in some regards I guess it might not turn out to be a bad year for Linux. I’m sure the usual suspects will be feeling a nasty bite soon and although they might not really have their hearts behind anything that has to do with free, according to Bruce Byfield, “when the talk turns to free and open source software (FOSS), suddenly the mood brightens. Whether their concern is the business opportunities in open source or the promotion of free software idealism, experts see FOSS as starting from a strong base and actually benefiting from the hard times expected next year.” http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3793286/Linux+in+2009:+Recession+vs.+GNU.htm

Putting your apache on a diet and then restarting might be all the oomph you need, but you’ll probably see only a slight difference. Also, don’t just look at the memory usage right after a restart. Until your servers are actually called upon for battle, they’re just going to allocate the minimum requirements, so you might have a bunch of httpd’s running using say 10 meg each, but once they’re stressed, you might see them jump to to 20-30 meg and not let go. You’re probably going to get the most mileage out of tuning the number of servers running, maximum clients, minimum and maximum spare’s, etc. If you’re not expecting a lot of traffic and your memory is limited, you probably shouldn’t run a boat load of servers. Keep your MaxClients low so you don’t spawn so many that you start swapping right from the word go.

Your site, your traffic, and the type of content being loaded is going to affect your optimal settings. So just dive in and play around with the numbers.  Stress test your site and let it run a little while. If it gets better, then you’re probably pushing the numbers in the right direction! I’m sorry if you were looking for a “type 123 at prompt xyz” type of tutorial here. What’s working for me with 128 meg of memory is probably a little slim for the next guy.

I just hate to see people jump ship from apache to something like lighty just because they hear apache is bloated or experience that from their distribution’s default setup. Switching to another web server may just give yourself more headaches in the long run because you’re probably going to have to tweak lighty to work with the apps you’d like to run — apps that are already set up to work with apache right out of the box.

linux selinux=0 reiserfs

Replace the ‘reiserfs’ with ‘jfs’ if you want that file system.  You’ll have to include the selinux=0 because you can’t use SELinux with ReiserFS or JFS.

All too easy…

f = open(infile,’r')
lines = f.readlines()
i = iter(lines)
while true:
.     try:
.        line = i.next()
.    except StopIteration:
.        pass