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 ?