[PLUG] smashing php caching crashing -- ready for server thrashing

["Keith Bentrup" <keith@lucidts.com>]

hi guys,
 i recently tried to up the performance of our web server a bit, we
have a collocator who's a friend, and we're reluctant to leave even
though he has painfully slow midday traffic
 since we use some online groupware to run the office, we need to
squeeze every bit of juice out of our web server (RH7) so this is
what we did recently (though probably should have done long ago) ...
turned on compression via ob_gzhandler, recompiled php and moved the
session management to memory rather than files, and installed turck
mmcache <- now this is my best guess where the problem is
 since we did this tuning, apache sporadically stops serving php pages
(html pages are fine), i don't remember the exact output from wget
when testing but the error was something like ... unexpected end of
file error while parsing headers  ... next time it happens i'll try
to run some more diagnostics but i don't want to keep the site down
too long since we depend on it
  i've searched some newsgroups for some answers relating to mmcache
but nada ... does anyone have experience with this or how i can
further diagnose it ... someone suggested telneting into port 80 and
check out the headers, the logs are error free though
  i could uninstall the mmcache but some rudimentary benchmarks via ab
suggest a 3-5x performance gain, i'm loath to give that up! instead
i've just restarted apache 4 times in the past 3 days to correct the
problem

thanks for any help or pointers,
-keith :)

--
Keith H. Bentrup
Lucid Tech Solutions, LLC
610.543.7725 [office]
610.960.5360 [cell]
300 S. Chester Rd - Suite 100
Swarthmore, PA 19081
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