Which Apache2 modules can I safely disable?

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+1 Q:

Which Apache2 modules can I safely disable?

These are my enabled mods:

alias auth_basic authz_default authz_groupfile authz_host authz_user autoindex deflate dir env mime negotiation php5 reqtimeout rewrite setenvif status

I'm attempting to reduce Apache's memory footprint as much as possible.

Can anyone guide me in the right direction as to which of these I absolutely need and which are optional? I plan on running Symfony, but I couldn't find any requirements about symfony to get it all working.

Thanks!

+1 A:

Well, you can start by disabling all auth / authz modules, unless you're going to have Apache do authentication work for you, in which case only enable the auth module that you're actually going to use.

You may not really need the autoindex module; you only need it if you'd like Apache to generate index files automatically.

deflate - you actually want that, so Apache can gzip-compress data before sending back to the client (dramatically reduces traffic).

reqtimeout - that's experimental. Not sure if you included it intentionally or not.

Isaac 2010-10-10 05:50:21

Thanks for that, I was able to disable *almost* all the mods you suggested with no problems. However, when I disabled authz_host I got this error when restarting the server: We failed to correctly shutdown apache, so we're now killing all running apache processes. This is almost certainly suboptimal, so please make sure your system is working as you'd expect now! ... waiting Syntax error on line 161 of /etc/apache2/apache2.conf:Invalid command 'Order', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

greggory.hz 2010-10-10 06:03:03

Oh, sorry about that. Yes, `authz_host` provides the `Allow` / `Deny` / `Order` directives (see http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_authz_host.html) which are somewhat elementary. :-)

Isaac 2010-10-10 06:11:45

Be very careful disabling anything unless you are sure that it isn't being used or isn't a dependency of another module. If you use a control panel or have other accounts on the server, disabling apache modules can break things.

Jestep 2010-10-13 17:01:20

I should have mentioned: once you disable a module, and before reloading the configuration, you can use the `apache2ctl` utility to test the configuration: `apache2ctl configtest`.

Isaac 2010-10-13 18:04:27

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Which Apache2 modules can I safely disable?

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