Hosting Server Setup Recommendations

It was noticed that many server's default setup is very inefficient. It lead to poor script performance and in some hosting can terminate your account due to heavy load. This document covers very basic recommendations on how to improve your site performance by slightly changing your server configuration.

This recommendations are for dedicated or VPS server owners, however if you are on shared hosting and notice that your server configuration is inefficient you can ask your hosting support do change this settings on the server, so whole server will run faster.

MySQL

[mysqld]

query_cache_limit = 1M query_cache_size = 32M

key_buffer_size = 64M

max_heap_table_size = 256M tmp_table_size = 256M

thread_cache = 128

First you need to check if query_cache is enabled on your server. It was noticed that 80% of all SELECT queries are taken from query_cache when it is enabled, so if it is disabled on your server - mysql performance is 5 times slower !

To check this go to phpMysqlAdmin tool (in most cases it is in your whm panel -> SQL Services -> phpMyAdmin). Then click "Variables" tab. "query cache size" must be at lesat 16M, "query cache type" must be ON and "query cache limit" value should be around 1M: