I have a Pentium III 750 with 512 ram and of late its been giving out server busy around 6-7 central time. I'm on cable modem and it takes 1 minute plus to load the site at these times.

I do use CGI and mySQL scripts.

How many people can log on a server like this at once without it being a problem?

check your httpd.conf to see how many threads it opens up.. also you might want to recompile it for more connections

I've seen some servers that can reach load 120.00

Our main server, cobra hit a load of 130.0 and only showed a minor performance decrese. The reason for this load was due to a customer running a (vBulletin) bulletin board that surpassed the shared hosting limitations, running anywhere from 100 -> 200 concurrent users on at a time.

The server is setup with an:

Athlon XP 1700+
1GB RAM
RedHat 7.2
2x 60GB HD (RAID 1)
CPanel/WHM

It held the load pretty well, so well none of the other customers on the server knew there was a load that high, once the customer was removed, it sunk back down to .05.

I guess it all narrows down to what hardware you use and how your server is setup :).

Sites running slow again now.

How much difference does an increase in Ram make? Like from 512 to 1024.

I have a dedicated server and with my heavy CGI use it isn't unusual for the load to be > 200 at peak times. Performance is only slightly decreased. One time it was around 500 but the server was still going strong. I'm thinking about putting a bit more RAM in it however.

How much difference does an increase in Ram make? Like from 512 to 1024.

None at all if RAM isn't the bottleneck. First of all you should find out how much memory your computer is crunching during peak-times.

You say that it occasionally takes a long time to load web-pages from your server. Do you monitor your system during these times to find out if it's your system who's causing the long waiting time?

- krc

Originally posted by Matrix
I have a Pentium III 750 with 512 ram and of late its been giving out server busy around 6-7 central time. I'm on cable modem and it takes 1 minute plus to load the site at these times.

I do use CGI and mySQL scripts.

How many people can log on a server like this at once without it being a problem?

Unlimited. ;)

Unlimited? :eek: :confused: :eek:

Originally posted by hosthero
Unlimited? :eek: :confused: :eek:

Heh. I invoked a pretty nutty response. Why not ban "unlimited" (i.e. make it show "*********" instead of "unlimited")? :D

Right now the server is acting up again and has a load average of 70.13

The CPU readings are 5.6% user
14.5% system
0.0% nice
56.5 % idle

memory readings:
254880k average, 252640k used, 2240k free, 32k shared, 1496 buff

Swap:
525120k average, 510088k used, 20302 free, 6340 cached

Originally posted by Matrix
Right now the server is acting up again and has a load average of 70.13

The CPU readings are 5.6% user
14.5% system
0.0% nice
56.5 % idle

memory readings:
254880k average, 252640k used, 2240k free, 32k shared, 1496 buff

Swap:
525120k average, 510088k used, 20302 free, 6340 cached

I'd get more RAM. :(

I am no expert, but your physical and swap memory are maxed out. more RAM :)

Originally posted by Matrix
I have a Pentium III 750 with 512 ram ...

Originally posted by Matrix
Right now the server is acting up again and has a load average of 70.13

The CPU readings are 5.6% user
14.5% system
0.0% nice
56.5 % idle

memory readings:
254880k average, 252640k used, 2240k free, 32k shared, 1496 buff

Swap:
525120k average, 510088k used, 20302 free, 6340 cached

You only have 256MB RAM, not 512MB as you've said. If you're paying for 512MB RAM and this is a dedicated server, I suggest you talk to your host.

Anyway, 512MB won't suffice in this case so if it's their mistake they shall add another 512MB as compensation :)

what scripts are you running anyway? and how popular is your site? is it the www.Bettorstalk.com site?

It appears for the time being that it was a script that I was using called Advertpro. I've since removed all of the coding on the websites that I have and i'm going to see how it does this week.

For some reason this script would use anywhere from 2% to almost 4% of the cpu when it would run a banner. So when a lot of people accessed the site that was eating up the CPU.

As for the ram yes it should be 512mb so thanks for pointing that out. I don't know why its at only 256 because I paid extra for that upgrade 18 months ago when the server was set up.