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Apache Further Tweaking
For mixed purpose sites (say image galleries, download sites, etc.), you can often improve performance by running two different apache daemons on the same server. For example, we recently compiled apache to just serve up images (gifs,jpegs,png etc). This way for a site that has thousands of stock photos. We put both the main apache and the image apache on the same server and noticed a drop in load and ram usage. Consider a page had about 20-50 image calls -- the were all off-loaded to the stripped down apache, which could run 3x more servers with the same ram usage than the regular apache on the server.
Finally, think outside the box: replace or supplement Apache
Use a 2nd server
You can use a tiny, lightning fast server to handle static documents & images, and pass any more complicated requests on to Apache on the same machine. This way Apache won't tie up its multi-megabyte processes serving simple streams of bytes. You can have Apache only get used, for example, when a php script needs to be executed. Good options for this are:
TUX / "Red Hat Content Accelerator" - http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/tux/
kHTTPd - http://www.fenrus.demon.nl/
thttpd - http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/
Try lingerd
Lingerd takes over the job of feeding bytes to the client after Apache has fetched the document, but requires kernel modification. Sounds pretty good, haven't tried it. lingerd - http://www.iagora.com/about/software/lingerd/
Use a proxy cache
A proxy cache can keep a duplicate copy of everything it gets from Apache, and serve the copy instead of bothering Apache with it. This has the benefit of also being able to cache dynamically generated pages, but it does add a bit of bloat.
