NVB
11-19-2001, 12:10 PM
Last night there was a major slowdown on my server. A typical page view took 5-8 seconds. It seemed to take a while to find the site, while the actual data transfer was fast.
I looked at traceroutes and pings from several locations in the US. Everything looked good. There were no unusual delays. I tried test downloads, and again things were fast. Some large downloads were as high as 3MB/s. One unusual thing was it seemed to take a while to connect via ftp. Sometimes the connection would be timed out, it would say unable to resolve the domain name. The same thing happened when I connected with the IP address, rather than the domain name. I tried viewing pages with the Lynx browser at locations all over the US. All of them were experiencing the slowdown. I received many emails saying that visitors were having problems.
My web host and the other servers that share my facility did not appear to be experiencing problems. It seemed to be localized to my server. The problems went away after I did a restart using the command apachectl restart. I have not done a resart in one or two months, but I thought that frequent restarts were not necessary.
The problems began soon after my site was experiencing very high traffic. The site was getting about 100,000 hits per hour (in spite of the huge slowdown). The server load averaged about 0.4 with peaks of about 1.5.
Does anyone have any guesses what could have caused this slowdown and what I can do to prevent it from happening in the future?
I looked at traceroutes and pings from several locations in the US. Everything looked good. There were no unusual delays. I tried test downloads, and again things were fast. Some large downloads were as high as 3MB/s. One unusual thing was it seemed to take a while to connect via ftp. Sometimes the connection would be timed out, it would say unable to resolve the domain name. The same thing happened when I connected with the IP address, rather than the domain name. I tried viewing pages with the Lynx browser at locations all over the US. All of them were experiencing the slowdown. I received many emails saying that visitors were having problems.
My web host and the other servers that share my facility did not appear to be experiencing problems. It seemed to be localized to my server. The problems went away after I did a restart using the command apachectl restart. I have not done a resart in one or two months, but I thought that frequent restarts were not necessary.
The problems began soon after my site was experiencing very high traffic. The site was getting about 100,000 hits per hour (in spite of the huge slowdown). The server load averaged about 0.4 with peaks of about 1.5.
Does anyone have any guesses what could have caused this slowdown and what I can do to prevent it from happening in the future?