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<h2 id="_a_href_index_html_index_a_8594_a_href_cookbook_html_cookbook_a"><a href="index.html">Index</a> → <a href="cookbook.html">Cookbook</a></h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
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<h2 id="_cookbook_optimizing_cherokee">Cookbook: Optimizing Cherokee</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph"><p>Cherokee’s default parameters are suitable for most cases. However,
there are a number of things that can be tweaked in order to improve
the behavior of Cherokee under special circumstances.</p></div>
<h3 id="compiled">Compiled capabilities</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>First of all you should check the capabilities that have been built
into your specific Cherokee build. This can be done by:</p></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content">
<pre><tt>$ cherokee -i
Compilation
Version: 1.0.0
[...]
Support
IPv6: yes
Pthreads: yes
Tracing: yes
sendfile(): yes
syslog(): yes
Polling methods: select poll epoll</tt></pre>
</div></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The last section is interesting. If you see that any significant
capability supported by your platform is missing, you should really
build another binary or check if something is wrong with your
system. Note that not every single capability is present in every
platform. For instance, <tt>epoll</tt> is a polling method specific to Linux
platforms, and its absence from any non-Linux system is perfectly
normal. It is inherently more efficient than the other methods
available on Linux. For BSD based platforms <tt>kqueue</tt> is also a great
improvement over the most standard <tt>poll</tt>. This is the standard POSIX
conformant system call, and will only be available on systems that
follow the POSIX standard. From the list above, the capabilities that
have a dramatic impact in the speed of Cherokee are the polling
methods, the existence of sendfile() and the Pthreads support.</p></div>
<h3 id="tweaks">Tweaks</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>There is no general recommendation that is the best for everybody. In
general Cherokee’s default values try to offer a good compromise
between resources and performance, but for specific cases you will be
able to tweak somethings that may (or may not) improve the overall
performance. Some of the things to keep in mind are mentioned here.</p></div>
<div class="dlist"><dl>
<dt class="hdlist1">
Encoding
</dt>
<dd>
<p>
As it is explained in the <a href="modules_encoders.html">Encoders'</a>
documentation, compressing the information to be sent makes a lot of
sense for specific file types. It’s Not that much processing power is
used to compress a text file, for instance, and hardware is cheaper
than bandwidth, so you should encode files whenever it makes sense.
</p>
</dd>
<dt class="hdlist1">
Handler specific
</dt>
<dd>
<div class="ulist"><ul>
<li>
<p>
<strong>CGI, SCGI, FastCGI</strong>: <a href="other_goodies.html#x-sendfile">X-Sendfile</a>
support can be enabled or disabled. If you know what this is, you
will know how X-Sendfile improves performance by assigning the task
of serving files to the web server while leaving the backend
application to run free without waiting for the task to end. This
gives you extra performance at no cost, but of course your
application must specifically make use of this feature.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<strong>Static Content</strong>: IO cache is a caching mechanism that dramatically
improves performance serving files. The caching algorithm is very
efficient and assures that a file will be immediately served while it
remains cached. The usage of IO cache is absolutely recommended in
all cases except when the contents of the files are changed
frequently. Note that the global <em>IO Cache</em> setting from the
<em>Advanced</em> section (see bellow) must be enabled for each individual
handler’s setting to be taken into account.
</p>
</li>
</ul></div>
</dd>
<dt class="hdlist1">
General
</dt>
<dd>
<div class="ulist"><ul>
<li>
<p>
<strong>Timeout</strong>: The lower your timeout interval is, the faster you will
free up resources at the cost of cancelling viable but slow
connections.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<strong>Keep alive</strong>: This setting dramatically affects the speed at which
repeated connections are served to the same client. This is
especially noticeable when an asynchronous application is used. The
trade off is that, since connections are kept open more time, less
connections remain available for other clients in any given
moment. Cherokee does a pretty good job at reclaiming unused open
connections, especially when the number of connections approaches
the limit imposed to the system, but any way you should keep in mind
this.
</p>
</li>
</ul></div>
</dd>
<dt class="hdlist1">
Advanced
</dt>
<dd>
<div class="ulist"><ul>
<li>
<p>
<strong>Threads</strong>: The default value is chosen so that it is more than enough
to saturate the processors. You will probably not get much out of
this setting, since a higher value will not produce better results
and a lower one will simply increase the amount of unused processor
power.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<strong>File descriptors</strong>: By definition, the higher this limit is, the
less efficient will your system be in relative terms. However, it
is understood that if you are tweaking this value is because you
need to, that is, you have a very high load site. In these cases
increasing the file descriptors' limit makes sense because the
higher this limit is, the more connections Cherokee will be able to
handle. By default Cherokee does not touch this value and it uses
the one specified by your system.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<strong>IO Cache</strong>: This setting allows to enable or disable server-wide
the content caching. If disabled, the <em>IO Cache</em> settings of the
static content handlers will also be disabled, no matter what
behavior is desired in their specific configuration. This global
setting is essential if you are trying to debug a cache-related
bug in your server’s configuration.
</p>
</li>
</ul></div>
</dd>
</dl></div>
<h3 id="trace">Debug: Disable TRACE</h3><div style="clear:left"></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>When compiled with debugging support, Cherokee’s performance is
heavily penalized. Being able to trace the state of the web server at
a very low level is quite useful when you have to fine tune your
infrastructure, but once it is done you should disable this feature.
A production environment deserves only the finest tuned binaries.</p></div>
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