TheCrimsonHorror

cPanel/WHM come with a pretty decent all-around configuration, but when you're running a more powerful box, you can beef up your settings to get a little better performance. 

Today, I'll cover a few Tweaks that can be done to Apache and MySQL to get that little extra bang out of your server that's not just a little VPS running 4-5 sites. 

For Easy Apache, I went with the following, to keep up with new features, but not be 'bleeding edge'

In the first stage we run the Easy Apache and selected the following:

Apache Version 2.4
PHP Version 5.5
 In step 5 “Exhaustive Options List” selected – Deflate – Expires – MPM Prefork and – MPM Worker

Next item to review is the Apache Global Configuration limits
WHM » Service Configuration » Apache Configuration » “Global Configuration”
These are pretty generic numbers based on how many GB's of ram on the server, these can still be tweaked a little further based on your usage, 

Apache Directive 	 	2GB             6GB             12GB 	 	

StartServers 	 	 	4 	 	8 	 	16 	
MinSpareServers 	 	4 	 	8 	 	16 	
MaxSpareServers 	 	8 	 	16 	 	32 	
ServerLimit 	 	 	64 	 	128 	 	256 	
MaxRequestWorkers 	 	50 	 	120 	 	250 	
MaxConnectionsPerChild 	 	1000 	 	2500 	 	5000 
Keep-Alive			On		On		On
Keep-Alive Timeout	 	5	 	5	 	 5
Max Keep-Alive Requests		50	 	120	 	120
Timeout				30		60		60


From here, I wanted to add in some basic Caching to Apache by default, so even is users don't specify Cache lifetimes, this will override.
WHM » Service Configuration » Apache Configuration » Include Editor » “Pre VirtualHost Include” 

# Cache Control Settings for one hour cache
<FilesMatch ".(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=86400, public"
</FilesMatch>

<FilesMatch ".(xml|txt)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=86400, public, must-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>

<FilesMatch ".(html|htm)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=3600, must-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>

# Mod Deflate performs data compression
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
<FilesMatch ".(js|css|html|php|xml|jpg|png|gif)$">
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch bMSIE no-gzip
</FilesMatch>
</IfModule>

With this, basic media files, such as images and flash vids are forcibly browser cached for a day, and html files for an hour. 
This helps to account for the inaction of clients, and ensure that basic caches are in place. Making page loads a little faster, and server loads a little slower for repeat visitors. 



In /etc/my.cnf I made the following additions to optimize the connections and buffering. 

[mysqld]
local-infile=0
max_connections = 600
max_user_connections=1000
key_buffer_size = 512M
myisam_sort_buffer_size = 64M
read_buffer_size = 1M
table_open_cache = 5000
thread_cache_size = 384
wait_timeout = 20
connect_timeout = 10
tmp_table_size = 256M
max_heap_table_size = 128M
max_allowed_packet = 64M
net_buffer_length = 16384
max_connect_errors = 10
concurrent_insert = 2
read_rnd_buffer_size = 786432
bulk_insert_buffer_size = 8M
query_cache_limit = 5M
query_cache_size = 128M
query_cache_type = 1
query_prealloc_size = 262144
query_alloc_block_size = 65535
transaction_alloc_block_size = 8192
transaction_prealloc_size = 4096
max_write_lock_count = 8
slow_query_log
log-error
external-locking=FALSE
open_files_limit=50000

[mysqld_safe]

[mysqldump]
quick
max_allowed_packet = 16M

[isamchk]
key_buffer = 384M
sort_buffer = 384M
read_buffer = 256M
write_buffer = 256M

[myisamchk]
key_buffer = 384M
sort_buffer = 384M
read_buffer = 256M
write_buffer = 256M

#### Per connection configuration ####
sort_buffer_size = 1M
join_buffer_size = 1M
thread_stack = 192K

Then ran a Repair & optimize on the databases and restarted MySQL:

mysqlcheck --check --auto-repair --all-databases
mysqlcheck --optimize --all-databases
/etc/init.d/mysql restart