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Adjusting MaxClients in Plesk

Posted on Thursday September 10, 2009 in Work

I’m posting this here because I think it might save some people some time.

Last night and all of this morning I have been struggling with errors of the following type:

[Wed Sep 09 11:58:57 2009] [error] server reached MaxClients setting, consider raising the MaxClients setting

I have recently moved a client to a new Plesk server, and Apache would occasionally stop responding. Investigation showed that the MaxClients setting in Apache was being reached, due to a misconfiguration, and that httpd would just stop responding. Not a wonderful thing to have happen on a large site.

So, naturally, I checked out /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, found the MaxClients setting, edited, saved, and restarted Apache. No dice.

Then I discover that any increase in MaxClients should ensure that ServerLimit – so I checked, restarted, no dice. Still.

As it turns out, a Plesk server overwrites a bunch of stuff that you set in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf using a file located at /etc/httpd/conf.d/swtune.conf

This was the file that was setting my MaxClients to 10! Grr!

Edited the file, stopped and restarted Apache, so far, no more timeouts!

  1. You safe my life!

    I’m using an 1and1 Plesk VPS and it was sooooo slow.
    Now, I use a lot of ram (don’t mind, it’s shared) but the web page loads lighting.
    KeepAlive On also helps in speed (but eat much more ram).

    Posted by PacoSS on Nov 25, 12:21 PM

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