Should I leave cpanel? General server optimization

Tim Jay

Active member
I have been using cpanel/whm on centos for years now and I would like to make a change.
I'm a little tired of the apache /mysql combo as it seems to become sluggish as time goes on.

Cpanel has always been nice and provides some decent tools here and there but I think it hogs too much of the server. The site migration tool came in handy many times before.

I have a great server with a great host & over 120G ram + SoftRaid 2x160GB SSD.
I use memcached, maxcdn, a little bit of cloudflare for my xenforo setup.

Even so I seem to experience sluggishness on my forum quite often and random lockups right when I'm moderating or browsing my own site. It's fast 9 times out of 10.
I have read through many guides on optimizing xenforo, my.cnf, & things like that and feel that the site should never go slow.

In the last couple days I've woken up to an inaccessible site thanks to apache. The first time a hostname was hogging connections while trying to scrape so I blocked that and restarted. Today I saw a whole bunch of requests that were stuck in ..reading..

I'm starting to run out of ideas now and I'm seriously considering dropping cpanel and starting on a fresh server. I thought it might be issues caused by outdated addons but I rarely have anything in my server error logs.

Anyone here have any suggestions on what to try next?

This is my Online Now:
Total: 1,490 (members: 344, guests: 1,074, robots: 72)
it's more like online in the last hour though.
 
When using pingdom speed test I have 73/100.

My lowest grades are:
Leverage browser caching (The following cacheable resources have a short freshness lifetime.)
Remove query strings from static resources (Resources with a "?" in the URL are not cached by some servers)

Does anyone know how to disable these query strings? These are .jpg links that end in ?1458598567 for some reason.

You may want to try serverpilot or centminmod:).

Thanks Roldan, I will look into those :)

I feel like I don't necessarily have to drop cpanel with the resources on this server, but something has to change.
 
They are cache busters and required to ensure the updated images are served.

I have a custom icon addon for subforums on the front page and I don't plan on changing those icons any time soon but they are loading those cache buster strings.
 
You would need to contact the developer of the add-on for support with that.
 
I will second Alfa1.

With a server that large, I promise you cPanel isn't what's slowing things down. If Apache is not cutting it, getting rid of cPanel to fix that problem is a little ridiculous, to be perfectly honest.

You should notice a pretty big difference with Litespeed, and won't experience the bottlenecks of Apache. We have never seen a site that Litespeed can't handle.
 
Look into LiteSpeed. My big board runs a lot faster on it than on apache. There is a Cache plugin for XenForo.
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/litespeed-cache-community.5047/
Moving from Apache to LiteSpeed was one of the best decisions I made.

I will second Alfa1.

With a server that large, I promise you cPanel isn't what's slowing things down. If Apache is not cutting it, getting rid of cPanel to fix that problem is a little ridiculous, to be perfectly honest.

You should notice a pretty big difference with Litespeed, and won't experience the bottlenecks of Apache. We have never seen a site that Litespeed can't handle.

Thanks, I will definitely look into that.

How much are you guys spending on litespeed?
 
You could also try NGINX which is very comparable to Litespeed as far as results go and best of all it's free. They also have a cPanel plugin http://www.nginxcp.com
But if I'm not mistaken, you then have Apache AND NGINX running.. with NGINX as a front end reverse proxy and not a standalone NGINX configuration.
Nginx will work as a front end reverse proxy of your cPanel server along with apache. Which will increase the performance
 
and in other news, I'm hella jealous of your amount of users online!!!

I can only get that many when I buy ads!
 
This feels gimmicky to me.
Why? It means they don't limit the amount of ram you can have on the server. Their licencing limits the VPS licence to 8GB of RAM, so if your VPS has more than that, you need the 1CPU licence, rather than the Ultra VPS version.
 
1 core, Unlimited RAM...so this is not for hosting, this is for the software only?

fdsf.webp
and the Unlimited RAM applies to how much the software is limiting you to?

So like the cheaper package for this software would limit me to 8 gigs of RAM?

I don't get it, probably why i never tried litespeed...

from the linked page I would think I was leasing a server with this software included....jussayin
 
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