Hi all,

Currently I'm using a RAQ4 (512 Mb RAM) to host my site, when there are a lot of visitors the load frequently goes above 15-20.
If I transfer my site on a P3 800 mhz with 512 Mb RAM too, will the load decrease or not ? Will I have to get 1024 Mb RAM ?

(My site uses alot of PHP/MySQL)

Thanks for your help.

Your load times will be a lot better going with a pentium III processor....

Originally posted by ABW
Hi all,

Currently I'm using a RAQ4 (512 Mb RAM) to host my site, when there are a lot of visitors the load frequently goes above 15-20.
If I transfer my site on a P3 800 mhz with 512 Mb RAM too, will the load decrease or not ? Will I have to get 1024 Mb RAM ?

(My site uses alot of PHP/MySQL)

Thanks for your help.

Well the load is not that much depdendant on RAM as it is processor speed. I believe, correct me if I am wrong, but RaQ4's come with 400 or 450Mhz processors. So upgrading to a P3 800 will be quite a noticable difference. 512MB of RAM should suffice depending on what exactly you are doing. If your server is by majority ran by PHP and MySQL you may want to keep a large amount of RAM available for that. But definetly by doubling the processing speed, MAJOR load improvement.

Run the "top" program on the server via telnet/ssh. It should tell you how much free RAM and swap space you have. If you have no free RAM and are using a fair bit of swap space on your current server (with 512MB), then I'd definitely upgrade to 1GB on the new machine. RAM is pretty cheap nowadays. If it does show you still having free RAM, 512MB should be fine on the new box.

I'm all for throwing hardware at a performance problem but ...

Unless you're really getting a lot of hits (over 10,000 an hour) and probably even if you are I'd take a step back and examine your code. MySQL can log queries that take a long time to run. Turn that on. If you find a particular query that's taking a long time to run do an "explain" on that query.

If you find a query that's doing a table scan and you can add an index you can drop your load for free. (Well almost free - it'll take longer to do an insert or update into the table). I found a particular query on my site that was doing a table scan over 60,000+ rows. It took like 5 seconds. Add an index and it goes to under .5 seconds. One change took the server load from 5 to <1

You may find that you don't have any terribly long running queries. You may fix a few and find you still need more CPU. Either way it's still worth looking at and fixing.

Thanks. Your help is appreciated :) I will examine my MySQL code and see if I can optimize it.

Thanks again