I have a Server (2x Hexa-Core Xeon E5649 2.53GHz w/HT with 32GB RAM and 20000 GB Bandwidth) running Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS. The server runs LAMP and serves one website only, the estimated number of users is to be ~ 15,000 at the same time.

At the moment i have around 2000 users online each of them runs 50 MySQL queries (small values mostly select and insert) from the beginning until the end of the session. Server CPU Load is high at this number of connections while the RAM usage is almost 1GB out of 32GB its worth mentioning that the server was running very fast with no problems at all but am concerned about the load average. http://s12.postimage.org/z7hi6mz3h/photo.png

top - 03:02:43 up 9 min,  2 users,  load average: 50.83, 30.14, 12.83
Tasks: 432 total,   1 running, 430 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.1%us,  0.2%sy,  0.0%ni, 66.5%id, 33.1%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:  32939992k total,  3111604k used, 29828388k free,    84108k buffers
Swap:  2048280k total,        0k used,  2048280k free,  1621640k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                          
 2860 root      20   0 25820 2288 1420 S    3  0.0   0:11.18 htop                                                                                             
 1182 root      20   0     0    0    0 D    2  0.0   0:01.46 kjournald                                                                                        
 1935 mysql     20   0 12.3g 161m 7924 S    1  0.5 102:31.45 mysqld                                                                                           
   11 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.38 kworker/0:1                                                                                      
 1822 www-data  20   0  247m  25m 4188 D    0  0.1   0:01.81 apache2                                                                                          
 2920 www-data  20   0     0    0    0 Z    0  0.0   0:01.20 apache2 <defunct>                                                                                
 2942 www-data  20   0  247m  23m 3056 D    0  0.1   0:00.20 apache2                                                                                          
 3516 www-data  20   0  247m  23m 3028 D    0  0.1   0:00.06 apache2                                                                                          
 3521 www-data  20   0  247m  23m 3020 D    0  0.1   0:00.09 apache2                                                                                          
 3664 www-data  20   0  247m  23m 3132 D    0  0.1   0:00.09 apache2                                                                                          
 3674 www-data  20   0  247m  23m 3252 D    0  0.1   0:00.06 apache2                                                                                          
 3713 www-data  20   0  247m  23m 3040 D    0  0.1   0:00.09 apache2                                                                                          
    1 root      20   0 24328 2284 1344 S    0  0.0   0:03.09 init                                                                                             
    2 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd                                                                                         
    3 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.01 ksoftirqd/0                                                                                      
    6 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0                                                                                      
    7 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0                                                                                       
    8 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/1                                                                                      
    9 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/1:0


root@server:~/codes# vmstat 1
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa
19  0      0 29684012  86112 1689844    0    0    19   590  254  231 48  0 47  5
23  0      0 29704812  86128 1697672    0    0     4   320 11100 8121 77  1 22  0
33  0      0 29671044  86156 1705308    0    0     0  5440 13190 9140 95  1  4  0
33  3      0 29670088  86160 1706288    0    0     0 32932 12275 7297 99  0  1  0
35  0      0 29693456  86188 1710724    0    0     4   676 12701 7867 98  1  1  0
^C

I have not changed any of the default configurations that comes with Ubuntu. Is this load normal for such powerful server ? is there any optimization i can make to Apache/MySQL to minimize the load ? What do you recommend ?