This isn’t gonna be a how-to increase the performance of whm/cpanel, there are loads of awesome tutorials online and i’ll link so some of those in the bottom, this is just some of the tips I’ve learned over the years, that can and do, and make a difference on the performance of your vps / vds / dedicated box using WHM Cpanel.
1) Disable Unused Services
WHM is a complete package it takes care of the services, of making and managing the account and updating the server and itself, because of its versatility it has all these services and more that you would want from a hosting server, however all of these services are not required and some of them are serious performance hogs, so these are the ones you should check out and if you dont need, disable:
- SpamAssassin Server (spamd) – If you dont need anti-spam, nowadays most e-mail software/webmail provide anti-spam protection, so no point running it on your server, unless mail security is essential, also if you need it, you need to configure it properly so at least its not such a big performance hit.
- Clamav Antivirus – Same thing as SpamAssassin, but for Anti-virus, and well clamav just detects the really blatant virus, so trojans and mallware might get trhough anyways, so you can disable this one, but if you need it its the same thing as SpamAssassin, configure the hell out of it.
- Cpanel Pro – Added features, but not really needed.
- Statistics Software – Well with google analytics and other offsite statistics software, you can live with just one stats software and webalizer is probably the lightest, disable the rest.
- Mailman – Just use a php or offsite maillists systems.
- Webmail – Unless you are hosting, most people are using pop3/imap or just offsite mail, so choose the most basic like squiremail, disable the rest.
- Entropy Chat – enable only if you need it.
- Melange – enable only if you need it.
2) Tweaking Settings
- Uncheck Conserve Memory at the expense of using more cpu/diskio (however if you need the added memory, check it, but you take a performance hit).
- Choose the best version for you of Apache, Mysql, FTP, PHP (just choose the one that fits better to your uses), and then tweak it, make some online searchs on how to change the apache config’s or php settings (most are available right through WHM).
- Make sure the default catch-all mail address is set to FAIL, so that it uses as little CPU time/Disk Space as possible.
4) Upgrade / Update
This one is simple… not always having the latest and greatest is the best course of action, but there is a tendency for newer software to have better performance, less bugs and genereraly more secure, so when in doubt, always update, in this case, its setting up whm to update itself to the CURRENT or STABLE releases and make sure security packages are also on automatic, also from time to time running the easy apache, and the updates on the Software section (Server and System).
5) Keep an Eye on it and Adjust
Since every box is different (although im talking here about LAMP+WHM/CPanel), there are multiple variations of LAMP (using CentOS instead of Debian, or php4 instead of php5), also it depends on the sites/services you are doing with the box, if your sites are dynamic you kinda want to adjust php, if its a file server, you kinda can move to nginx (or another lightweight server, instead of apache), if you have a lot of Mysql work, its another thing, so not all rules or changes will work best, so keeping an eye on the performance of the box is important, not only if the CPU and RAM are good, but also how quick your pages load.
I know there are a lot of more tweaks you can make, for more in depth tweaking just make a search yourself, however just doing the ones i told should keep your box humming away pretty good ^_^
