Tag: Directives

In our last tutorial, we showed you how to install Apache’s mod_fcgid and provided Linux scripts to assist in transitioning from mod_php. In this next section, we’ll be discussing how to configure a baseline setting for PHP optimization.

When it comes to PHP execution, mod_fcgid (also called FCGI) is one of the heavyweight contenders. There are a few rival handlers, like PHP-FPM or mod_lsapi, which come close to matching its execution speed, but they generally leave something to be desired when it comes to fine-tuning and resource consumption. FCGI is built for speed and includes a myriad of Apache directives that can be leveraged for resource regulation.

EasyApache 4 installs, configures, updates, and validates your Apache, PHP and other services on your server. EasyApache 4 also supports multiple versions of PHP.  This allows you to assign different versions of PHP to each of your domains. There are great tools that have been implemented with EasyApache 4 that makes managing PHP versions simple. Two of these are the MultiPHP Manager and MultiPHP INI Editor. These can be found within the Web Host Manager, or “WHM” for short.  With the addition of these tools in cPanel/WHM, users can now complete most of these tasks from the Graphical User Interface. However, it is worth mentioning, attempting these tasks from the command line is recommended as we have seen better performance when compiling Apache builds.  

MyISAM is a table-locking based engine. Table-locking prevents all other processes from writing data to the target table. This locking behavior encompasses the entire MyISAM table, no matter how minor the data change. This type of locking preserves the integrity of the data but at the cost of performance. The performance penalty for using table-locking based engines like MyISAM become more laborious as the row count in the table grows. Very large tables will see a significant delay in performance when data needs to be written to a MyISAM table.

As discussed earlier in our MySQL Performance series, the InnoDB storage engine is designed to be a high-performance database for very large datasets. The row-locking technique it uses allows for many read and write requests to occur on a single table concurrently. This is a vast improvement in speed over traditional table-locking of the MyISAM engine. This part of our MySQL Performance series will focus on configuring InnoDB tables for maximum concurrency with minimal disk input/output (I/O).

The majority of work needed when adjusting the MySQL server is editing the applicable directives within a MySQL configuration file. There are multiple, optional configuration files that MySQL looks for when starting up. They are read in the following order: