Hi there,
I've got a server running h-sphere (control panel. http://www.psoft.net) and hosting one fairly large/busy website (12,000 member forum) its just a 2.0ghz celeron box but the httpd processes are starting to get out of hand, as soon as we start apache and people start browisng the forums there is upwards of 50 httpd processes. why is this exactly? each of them is using between 8mb and 18mb of ram and the box only has 512mb. each is also using a fair amount of cpu (in `top` the first few are 20% and 15% usage usually the the rest are anywhere from 0.5% to 5%.. all in all using around 90-100% usage all the time. What causes this to happen, anybody have any ideas? The database is fairly large - does it need a re-index possibly or would that not cause this sort of problem?

well how many people u have on the forums? more users will create more proccess

You really should upgrade that to 1GB RAM if you have 12,000 members.

Also try tweaking apache config, make sure keepalive is off and maxclients is set to something reasonable (around 512 in your case me thinks).

more users creates more processes? my other servers host lots of forums, collectively probably an average of 200 users online for most hours of the day and they only have 8-10 httpd processes running so I know thats not the case. Regardless, there is about 100 active users or more at any given time on these specific forums.

Greetings:

1. I agree on the memory.

2. If the forum uses a database, and you've not done so already, move the database to a separate, physical database server. H-Sphere allows for doing so.

3. A dual processor P3 or P4 would probably handle far better than the Celeron given the dynamic nature of the site.

4. In /hsphere/local/config/httpd/httpd.conf ensure you have

"HostnameLookups Off"

If you make changes to httpd.conf remember to restart Apache.

Lastly, the amount of RAM used by httpd depends on what's compiled into Apache; so that will vary from server to server unless the servers have Apache compiled the same.

Thank you.

Awesome, thanks for the suggestions guys. I'm gonna give them a try real soon.

About the seperate database server, more ram and dual-cpu box suggestions though, this site was running on a shared hosting box up until a few weeks ago, and when we first moved it to this new dedicated box it was running amazing, there has only been a few hundred new users, if that, since we moved it. When we first put it online it was usually only using less than 50% cpu at peak hours when the active users was up close to 200 - I know these specs can handle the forums reasonably - I'm not saying its optimal, not at all - but it was only a couple of weeks ago that it was running MUCH better than it is now..

I'll see what these little tweaks can do for me though - thanks again!

Oh, one last thing - should I try re-indexing the database? Does that help these sort of problems?

Greetings:

Re-indexing might help. You may also want to check with the database forum author for recommened configuration settings for the database as well as the Web server.

Thank you.

If you haven't enable mysql caching and haven't installed php caching module - those are first two steps you need to consider.