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Moak
Asked: 2011-07-09 01:08:03 +0800 CST

Dedicate more cpu usage to apache and modules

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I'm currently trying to process a bunch of data with apache and php,
I estimate it will take a few hours and I'd like to reduce that time

In my webmin I see following information

CPU usage   25% user, 0% kernel, 19% IO, 55% idle

is there a way i can dedicate more cpu usage to the process temporarily? (even if it means changing configs and restarting apache twice)

it's basically a lot of mysql selects/inserts/updates and regex

The processor is Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9400 @ 2.66GHz, 4 cores

Thanks for any tips on how to improve the speed

edit The CPU usage list shows this

ID      Owner       CPU     Command   
26841   mysql       38.6 %  /usr/sbin/mysqld --basedir=/usr --datadir=/var/lib/mysql --user=mysql --pid-file ...
5627    www-data    0.3 %   /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
apache-2.2 php5 mariadb ubuntu-10.04

2 Answers

  1. Given that you've got a quad core CPU and you're using exactly a quarter of it, I'd be inclined to say that you're running all your data processing in one single-threaded job. This will only use one CPU core. Rewrite your code to execute several tasks in parallel (either through threads or multiple independent processes) and it will use all of your CPU cores correctly. This is not a trivial operation.

    Note that questions regarding parallelising your code should be directed to Stack Overflow.

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  2. MySQL from version 5.0 is already multi-threaded and optimized for running on multi-core systems. Is your disk subsystem running well ? Maybe the disk is representing the bottleneck.

    Otherwise, you have to recode your PHP scripts in order to run as multiple parallel processes as stated above. PHP does not fully support threading within one instance, or it is struggle to use it.

    @edit: Or you can divide data to some blocks if it is possible and process it by running multiple different PHP scripts.

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