Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL® and Apache All in One

Proactive Performance Tuning

Although previous sections explained which settings might prevent Apache from scaling, the following are some techniques for proactively increasing the performance of your server.

Mapping Files to Memory

As explained previously, accesses to disk affect performance significantly. Although most modern operating systems keep a cache of the most frequently accessed files, Apache also enables you to explicitly map a file into memory so that access to disk isn't necessary. The module that performs this mapping is mod_file_cache. You can specify a list of files to memory map by using the MMapFile directive, which applies to the server as a whole. An additional directive in Apache 2.0, CacheFile, takes a list of files, caches ...