Increasing site traffic has escalated both our cpu and memory issues such that I am constantly tweeking 'bad-bot' and other defences against multiple concurrent connections, from single IP's, IP ranges and in total, using both mod_security and fail2ban/firewalld rules.
The problem has prompted 2 x server upgrades in the past 6 months. I now want to see if I can make better use of available resources, before having another server u/g forced on us.
Among other things I am considering moving to the Apache event-MPM using php-fpm and mod_proxy_fcgi because it is claimed to half (or better) process memory usage and provide major cpu-related speed improvements over the old pre-fork-MSM - I understand that thread-safe issues have been addressed such that the setup is now close to the old pre-fork safety. I would welcome confirmation (or otherwise) of that from anyone.
Any pointers/comments etc from anyone with experience of this setup would be appreciated. Also any pointers on optimising SMW query caching since the site makes very heavy use of property-based queries and I have a gut feeling that judicious SMW caching might help to speed things further.
I know much of this may seem a more appropriate to an Apache list but I think the php issue combined with both MW and SMW make it relevant here.
PeterP Wikispooks https://wikispooks.com
PS. FI: posted to both MW and SMW lists