My optimized settings for centminmod (high traffic)

Centminmod is optimized from install but you can get a lot more out of it. I have been doing a lot of loader.io testing on my server with centminmod and these are the settings that worked the best. Keep in mind i am a complete newb to centminmod and just found it out couple weeks back.

Server: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5620 @ 2.40GHz 32 core/threads. With 16GB ram.
Results


Pretty cool, huh?. With cpanel, my server would choke at 150+ users, now 2k feels nothing.

Settings:

Enable Nginx thread pools.

In nginx.conf, enable these

make them equal to cores on your cpu
worker_processes 32;

events {
<Add this in event>
accept_mutex off;
}
http {
include mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;

<Add these>
access_log off;
sendfile on;
sendfile_max_chunk 512k;

Then in your domain name conf file in location block, just add this

location / {
aio threads;
}

Done, see the performance increase!

Mysql settings

I didn't bother much with mysql as i have no clue and centminmod claims it's already optimized. Just changed one thing
max_connections = 5000

PHP-FPM settings

These make a huge difference. I have seen on apache cpanel how my server performed badly when they weren't set right.

---

pm = ondemand
pm.max_children = 200
; Default Value: min_spare_servers + (max_spare_servers - min_spare_servers) / 2
pm.start_servers = 8
pm.min_spare_servers = 4
pm.max_spare_servers = 12
pm.max_requests = 5000

Maybe dynamic is better as there will be processes hanging around, i just stick with ondemand.

Memcached!

The number one thing that helped take some load off mysql and manage so much user was memcache. Maybe i could get more out of it but i was pretty happy with the results, i don't know if i will ever have a site with more than 2k active users LOL. These settings made the site fly for 2k users.

CON=2048
BACKLOG=2048
MAXREQ=4000
THREADS=30 // set to number of cores on your cpu
MEMSIZE=1024

Lastly, put this in your domain conf file if you're using Xenforo. XF provides it already.
location ~ \.php$ {
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}

Feel free to critique/suggest how you think i could do better.

 

Yes, it's a dedi. I got it pretty cheap last year.

You're not wrong. It's an overkill of a machine. I thought i needed it. When i was on shared hosting, the suggestion my host gave me was to upgrade to a VPS whenever i would get some traffic spike. When i upgraded to VPS, the suggestion was to upgrade to a dedicated because VPS can't handle my traffic. When i got a cheap dedicated and installed cpanel myself, it started to have problems, i thought i need an upgrade and got this machine pretty cheap thankfully.


I just believed handling traffic is really hard for web servers and you need really powerful machines. I also thought you just install cpanel and it does what it's supposed to do. After all they charge so much for their license.

Oh boy seeing what a 5$ digitalocean droplet do with centminmod that my dedicated can has been an eye opener. I am not going to renew cpanel license next month and in process of switching already.

Centminmod is making hosting companies lose a lot of money i am going to be on a cheap VPS now.

 

That's correct. I think centminmod had set some of the variables for nginx thread pooling already as well. Can't remember but for the purpose of this guide, i mentioned the needed variables.

No, it should be in domain config only. I believe in nginx conf, it will enable server wide

Edit: nvm, eva replied^. Follow his advice.