UnCap Apache

[KORI]

hi i have a little web server on my lan but i cant get any thing to go any faster then 300-500 off my apache web server is there a setting in the cfg file to uncap this?
thanks

 

[tim_m]

300-500 are just numbers. 300-500 what?

there are various performance settings in httpd.conf like

Timeout 300
KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
KeepAliveTimeout 15

MaxRequestsPerChild 0
ThreadsPerChild 50

but you need to tell us what your qeustion is first

 

[KORI]

oops sorry thought i had that 300-500k of out going bandwidth

 

[mikeblas]

You're still not there. 300-500k of what per what? Bytes per day? Hour? Requests per month?

 

[KORI]

per sec

 

[doh]

per sec

You're making no sense at all.

Bandwidth is a rate and requires three metrics to make it mean anything. It needs a quantity, a unit of data measurement, and a time frame.

300 kilobytes per second is meaningful. 300k is not. 300k per second is not meaningful.

 

[maw]

sounds like you might be limited by your Internet provider. If you're on cable, this is not unusual. They give you gobs of download speed but severely limit your upload speed, this is done to restrict users from hosting huge, high traffic web or ftp sites while paying only the residential plan rates.

to be honest though, the severely limited upload speed is still plenty for a moderate website.

 

[KORI]

ok....maybe this will help the web is on my 10/100/1000 lan the computer is on this same lan but when i want to download something off it over the lan wont will not go any faster then 300-500kb i want to uncap this so i can get the full lan speed from the web server to my computer hope this helps ans thanks so for being unclear about my wants

 

[TheDude05]

I'm not positive but I don't think Apache has any sort of bandwith cap.

 

[jpmkm]

I'm not positive but I don't think Apache has any sort of bandwith cap.

At least not without a fair bit of work and some external tools, but, like you said, that's not even apache limiting the bandwidth; it is external to apache.

OP: I'm assuming you've tested your network and other transfers go much faster, right? I would just use a regular file sharing protocol rather than apache to share files, if that is all you are doing.

 

[The_Mage18]

<devil's advocate>

You'll have to remember network speeds are measured in MegaBITS per second, not MegaBYTES.

If your switch is a 10/100 MBps, then the maximum transfer rate you'll get is 12.5 Megabytes per second, and even that is damn near impossible to achieve.

Factors like the network card, cables, quality of the way the devices are connected to one another (switch vs hub, managed switch vs unmanaged switch, the switch fabric), the transfer speed of the drives in the system, etc. are all going to affect it.

Seriously though, if all you're doing is sharing files, dump Apache and setup an FTP or even a Samba share. Samba would let you open the share like a regular shared drive on the network and will be much faster than Apache because it doesn't have to send a ton of ACK NACK packets back and forth.

 

[HHunt]

For the record, I just compared apache with NFS here.
I'm on a wireless network that's nominally 54Mbit, but as always, the practical max speed is a lot lower.
I tried pulling down a single large file and watching ifstat.
With NFS, I get about 1.3 MB/s of raw (IP level, not hardware level) bandwidth usage.
With apache, I get exactly the same.
The network is the limiting factor in this case, and I imagine (from earlier experience) that it would continue to be even on 100Mbit and a much wimpier server than my XP1600.

Unless the server is very underpowered apache really should do better than that. It's plenty fast with the default settings.
What OS? What network card?

 

[The_Mage18]

For the record, I just compared apache with NFS here.
I'm on a wireless network that's nominally 54Mbit, but as always, the practical max speed is a lot lower.
I tried pulling down a single large file and watching ifstat.
With NFS, I get about 1.3 MB/s of raw (IP level, not hardware level) bandwidth usage.
With apache, I get exactly the same.

I stand corrected. I figured Apache would slow things down a bit using http for file transfers.

 

[HHunt]

I stand corrected. I figured Apache would slow things down a bit using http for file transfers.

I just tried something on the aforementioned XP1600:

nord# fetch [url]http://localhost/dr_strangelove.avi[/url]
dr_strangelove.avi                            100% of  918 MB   19 MBps 00m00s
nord#

I'm fairly sure 19MB/s is the highest sustained transfer rate I'll get out of the HD it read from, since this only got CPU usage up to about 60%.
Roughly 10% was httpd, 35% fetch, the rest was system (most likely the ata driver).
(The destination drive is faster.)

Apache does add some overhead, but it seems to be very good at serving large files.
Makes sense, really; There are lots of downloads over http and most likely a lot of these are from apache servers. The relevant code has probably been heavily optimized.