Hello all this is my first post on this site and many people have told me that you guys really help people out so I got a big problem and Im going to explain it as best as I could.

Alright I have a forum that gets more traffic then usual. I get about 300-600 people online in 30 minute duration. Now my server keeps crashing constantly. The server load gets as high as 125. I have a dual xeon with upgraded ram to 3 GB. Everything was working fine until my server got hacked and I was forced to do a OS restore which wiped out everything. I did not backup my /etc/my.cnf file which stored a bunch of configurations for my server. Ever since I got things back up I have had nothing but problems and the server does not last longer then 4 hours without crashing.

I tried to google this problem with solving high server loads, mysql optimization anything I could find for the past month non stop and can not find anything.

My forum has a good amount of traffic and I dont know what I need to change as far as variables. I really think there is other people with this same problem, there has to be. What configurations can I change to make my server not crash daily? I have over 2.1 million posts with 60,000 members. Im very frustrated Im really hoping someone can help me solve this problem.

Thanks for your time.

Hello there if server was hack before and start crashing, I whould say get new server and move there. or I have use Rack911.com they done fine job on security. Good luck and welcome to WHT.

So have you checked to see if there are any processes with high CPU loads?

let us know what happens... best of luck

I would hire a system admin. to help optimize your site for the forum. I am sure a lot of settings need to be tweaked and it will be able to run fine. Best of luck.

It sounds like you will need to do some observation of your system. Servers crash for many reasons. To start off is the server actually crashing to the point of a reboot needed or is it just loading incredibly slow? Have you installed PRM or anything like that?

Clear some space, normally helps with cpu load

also I can say is use "top" and see whats the big process or whats draining your cpu if you find out post the process and We (I) try to help you from there, if that helps

You might want to look into a clustered and/or load balanced solution. I would suggest checking out CartikaHosting.com for requirements like that. Andrew and crew are really at the top of their game :)

Hello and welcome to WHT,

I'd say that obviously the problem is NOT in the server hardware since that same server kept the forum going well before being hacked. Now obviously you need to optimize your server. I would first go with "top" command to see where and what is actually "wrong" and then wonder off optimizing.

It is a good idea to check wheather MySQL (if that is what you use, you did not provide a lot of technical info) is running with persistent connections or not. In some cases this helps but in other is seriously degrades performance.

If you find that MySQL is the bottleneck you can try and pinpoint which are the most troublesome queries and try to either optimize them or MySQL itself. You can use "mysqladmin" as well as a utility called "mytop" to do that (you may have to read a bit how to use them thought).

In any case if you find anything unusual please report back we may be able to help more if we have more technical details at hand.

Best of luck.

Regards,

Sp0k0