How much users/day for 128Mb of RAM?

I have a dedicated Red Hat Linux server with 128Mb RAM. I've currently 30'000 visitors a day (1250/hours) on some free hosts and when I redirect them to my dedicated server, the server is full in a few seconds.

Right now my MaxClient property on httpsd.conf is 150 and I know I could change this but when I look at the running process (using the 'top' utility), I see that 95% of my RAM is used already (and 0.2% of CPU). Each httpsd process takes 2.4% of RAM! Isn't ~3Mb a lot?! I use PHP and MySQL but that still seems a lot to me!!! (I mean, I don't use Windows! URL ).

I'll updgrade my RAM soon but I'm not even sure if 256Mb will be enough! Maybe I should go with 512Mb? Or maybe is there a way to optimize Apache so that each process takes less RAM? Should I remove some of the default modules? I could remove mod_perl since I don't use it but maybe other modules? Could I manage to get 1-2Mb of RAM per httpd process by changing some configurations?

Thanks,

sCandy

HI sCandy,

When I use Apache I also notice that it does you a good percent of the ram. The processor (800 Mhz) is usually about 90% free and I run plenty of scripts (mostly PERL) on the server. I have 512 megs of PC133 ram and it still looks like Apache takes up a great deal of the memory. Currently the server gets about 45,000 people a day total with all the websites on it. I would also like to know if by removing modules it will use a smaller amount of the ram. Good luck

------------------
The Big Webmaster

I don't have the answer, but I may have the link: http://www.apacheweek.com/tips/tips
Steffen