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20.4. Administration

System administrators have the opportunity to improve performance in ways that users, HTML authors, and programmers do not, because administrators deal directly with web and application servers.

Apache, by far the most successful web server, is used on more than half of all web sites. Apache has real-time performance monitoring tools and an optional log format that tells you how long each transfer took (see mod_log_config.html in the server documentation). Try to ensure that the server has been compiled with the latest C compiler and libraries for your server platform, or compile the server yourself.

See Dean Gaudet's notes on tuning Apache servers at http://www.apache.org/docs/misc/perf-tuning.html.

20.4.9. Use Specific Index Files

Instead of using a wildcard such as:

DirectoryIndex index 

use a complete list of options:

DirectoryIndex index.cgi index.pl index.html 

where you list the most common choice first.

20.4.12. Using mod_status

If you include mod_status and set Rule STATUS=yes when building Apache, then on every request Apache will perform extra timing calls so that the status report generated will include timings. This slows down performance, but gives you performance data. Take your pick.



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