What does apache (busy workers , idle workers) means

apache-2.2threadsworker-process

what is the meaning of Apache busy workers and idle workers? how the statistic of them help me to figure out performance problem with my server? enter image description here

Best Answer

If you have only very few or none idle workers it means Apache is using all the processes it is allowed to use and new incoming requests have to wait for older requests to finish before they can be handled. In this case, increasing the maximum allowed processes in your configuration file might help with performance under certain circumstances.

This is true if your system has reserves to handle additional apache processes. Each of them will need memory, CPU time and disk I/O.

If you don't have these reserves, increasing the MaxClients might be even contraproductive, as more processes will have to "fight" for the resources and it might be that reducing the number of maximum clients will improve performance if you already hit some bottleneck.

Related Solutions

Finding out what user Apache is running as

ps aux | egrep '(apache|httpd)' typically will show what apache is running as.

Usually you do not need to change the default user, "nobody" or "apache" are typically fine users. As long as its not "root" ;)

edit: more accurate command for catching apache binaries too

Apache monitoring busy vs idle workers

For the busy and idle workers, you can parse it from the status page, something like this:

busy_workers=`lynx -dump http://domain.com/server-status?auto | awk '/BusyWorkers/ { print $2 }'`
idle_workers=`lynx -dump http://domain.com/server-status?auto | awk '/IdleWorkers/ { print $2 }'`

For the waiting requests, you can calculate the numbers of concurrent connections and subtract to MaxClients directive:

concurrent_connections=`netstat -natp | grep httpd | grep ESTABLISHED | grep -v grep | wc -l`

From this result, you can plot a graph with any monitoring tools you want: gmetric (Ganglia), PNP4Nagios, ...

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Finding out what user Apache is running as

Apache monitoring busy vs idle workers

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