I'm using a dedicated Red Hat 7.1 box.

I use a couple of perl scripts extensively throughout my site to handle image display and video downloads.

As the site is high traffic I am having huge problems with performance. The scripts are chewing up a lot of processor time and the site is bogging down and often coming back unreachable.

Load averages are: 1.27, 1.42, 1.35 but they are hitting over 3 during peak times.

Besides removing the scripts, does anyone have any suggestions on what to do to reduce the onslaught so the server performs like it should?

If it is necessary to remove the scripts, am I better off using php to handle image dispaly and file downloads? I've been told that php generates a minimal load however I have had _no_ experience with it at all.

Regards,


Orsm.

That load is a little high but it shouldn't be enough to really bog things down. Anyway, yes PHP should reduce this a great deal. We have some pretty well used scripts even on our own site, but due to being PHP hardly make a dent in the load averages.

Greg Moore

Just an idea...

The problem may not be with PERL per se but you running them as CGI scripts... if you use mod_perl the load would probably come down

Cheers
Balaji

Login as a normal user (not root) type "top" and watch the processes. You can see what is killing your load. You also may want to invest in more RAM / faster chip / SCSI HD's.

Use mod_perl, FastCGI, or SpeedyCGI to reduce the overhead of running perl scripts.

It appears that apache was config'd to only run a limited number of processes.

We set it much higher and it has rectified the problems we were having.

Still cant use the perl scripts though - the traffic is too high and it bogs the server RIGHT down within only a few minutes.

Am looking for something similar in php that does what I was doing in perl - am hoping that will be less processor intensive.

Anyways - thanks for eveyones help.

Regards,


Orsm.

Originally posted by priyadi
Use mod_perl, FastCGI, or SpeedyCGI to reduce the overhead of running perl scripts.
Does FastCGI have probs with some scripts like mod_perl does?