19.5. Performance Tuning

Click on the Performance Tuning for most situations. Altering these settings may affect the overall performance of your Web server.

Set Max Number of Connections to the maximum number of simultaneous client requests that the server will handle. For each connection, a child httpd higher than 256 without recompiling. This option corresponds to the MaxClients directive.

Connection Timeout defines, in seconds, the amount of time that your server will wait for receipts and transmissions during communications. Specifically, Connection Timeout By default, Connection Timeout is set to 300 seconds, which is appropriate for most situations. This option corresponds to the TimeOut directive.

Set the Max requests per connection to the maximum number of requests allowed per persistent connection. The default value is 100, which should be appropriate for most situations. This option corresponds to the MaxRequestsPerChild directive.

If you check the Allow unlimited requests per connection option, the MaxKeepAliveRequests directive to 0, and unlimited requests are allowed.

If you uncheck the Allow Persistent Connections option, the KeepAlive directive is set to false. If you check it, the KeepAlive directive is set to true, and the KeepAliveTimeout directive is set to the number that is selected as the Timeout for next Connection value. This directive sets the number of seconds your server will wait for a subsequent request, after a request has been served, before it closes the connection. Once a request has been received, the Connection Timeout value applies instead.

Setting the Persistent Connections to a high value may cause a server to slow down, depending on how many users are trying to connect to it. The higher the number, the more server processes waiting for another connection from the last client that connected to it.