In our newest series of Reseller tutorials, Chris, head of the cPanel support team, is here to tell you how you can tweak your WHM to make it work better, faster and safer. If you have always had to edit settings you barely understand, hoping that this will make a problem go away, then you will find our latest post series just the thing you need.
Let’s start with
GENERAL WHM TWEAKING:
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Removing & Tweaking Unnecessary Services
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To speed up the overall performance of the VPS, you can do both WHM tweaking and in depth shell script tweaking (requires more administration knowledge, so don’t go changing any scripts if you are not sure what they do – while experimenting is fun, it’s best not to do it on a live, production server.). There are several services which are run by any VPS by default, and which you most likely will never need. To remove any of these services, log into WHM & go to Service Configuration > Service Manager.
Clamd: This daemon represents a virus scanning service which uses up a lot of memory, so you do not need to have it – just remove it. Virus scanning may sound important, but if you are alone on the server – you are very unlikely to upload a virus infected file. Not to mention that most Windows viruses will not work on our Linux servers.
Entropy Chat: Disable it – it’s a chat service that you do not need working on your VPS.
Spamd: This daemon takes up a lot of processes & memory. You can tweak the spamd daemon performance to reduce the load. Go to cPanel > Plugins & install spamdconf. Once done, go to the bottom of WHM & click on Setup Spamd Startup Configuration. Change the maximum children to 1 or 2. This will stop spamd from spawning too many child processes and thus – taking a lot of server memory.
cPanel Tweak Settings
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In WHM, under Server Configuration > Tweak Settings:
1. Make sure the default catch-all mail address is set to FAIL, so that it uses as little CPU time as possible. This e-mail address collects spam, which takes up not only CPU time, but also disk space.
2. Untick Mailman, as it also uses too much server resources.
3. Change the number of minutes between mail server queues to 180
4. Uncheck Analog Stats and Webalizer and use Awstats only – you don’t need 3 separate programs gathering stats and filling up disk space.