Introduction

This page is a collection point for ESX Server configuration options that can maximize web server performance regardless of the choice of web server.

TCP Transmit Coalescing

In a recent whitepaper published on SPECweb performance on VMware ESX Server, the use of TCP transmit coalescing was described to improve web server performance. The general idea behind transmit coalescing is to buffer TCP transmits at the ESX Server for a brief period of time to allow multiple packets to be transmitted at one time. This introduces a very slight increase in latency but can provide a dramatic increase in efficiency.

Transmit coalescing can be turned on with the following steps:

1. Using the VMware Infrastructure Client, choose the ESX Server host on which the virtual machine is deployed.
2. Click the Configuration tab.
3. Click Advanced Settings in the Software panel.
4. Click the Net tab.
5. Edit the Net.vmxnetThroughputWeight value to 128, then click OK.
6. Reboot the virtual machine.

Details and performance results are provided in the SPECweb paper .

Resources

Apache Best Practices

IIS Best Practices