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  1. #1

    What Ails My VPS?

    I have a VPS with 1.13 Ghz CPU & 768 MB RAM. The database is optimized and there are no PHP errors. I have quick-cache enabled.

    It is my experience that whenever I post something and there is a surge of traffic (300-500 concurrent visitors), my VPS becomes non-responsive.

    Yesterday, I posted something important which drew 5500 clicks (bitly) in the space of about an hour.

    Almost immediately after sending out the email about the post, my site became non-responsive.

    However, my CPU & RAM usage parameters (in Plesk) looked normal. Also, I rebooted the VPS twice but the situation did not change till late in the evening.

    I can understand a surge of 5500 simultaneous clicks taking down a site but my average hit count is way below this (300-500) and still the site becomes unresponsive.

    My questions:

    (i)Is it a normal symptom of heavy traffic that a site becomes non-responsive?

    (ii)Should not the CPU & RAM parameters in Plesk flash a warning signal?

    (iii)Should not rebooting the VPS solve the problem (unless the visitors kept refreshing the page)?

    (iv)My VPS provider has installed a "system snapshot" to help trouble-shoot the problem. How does one read this and take precautionary steps to mitigate the problem?

    (v) Are there any other diagnostic tools available to trouble-shoot the problem?

  2. #2
    May be you need to check Apache usage?

    Next time when you post some thing, try to open a console and run top command so that you can know where the load is happening.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Jun 2011
    Location
    Woodbridge, NJ
    Posts
    840
    Sounds like your VPS is I/O-bound, which is very common.

    An in-memory cache such as memcached could be the ticket.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Feb 2006
    Location
    Kepler 62f
    Posts
    16,703
    Plesk isn't very lean on Linux (unlike Windows), and 768MB is a minimum just to get the server to run well on modest traffic. You'd really want to look at putting at least 1GB on there -- possibly 2GB given the traffic spike.

    Also consider putting nginx in front of Apache, which can be done on Plesk via SSH. There's a guide for it online.

    A memcache would help, too. However, you'll definitely want to up your RAM before adding it. As mentioned, 768MB is really a minimum for running Plesk well (and all of its services), and memcache stores even more data in RAM. You'll smack the ceiling easily.

    I've been a Plesk user for quite a few years now.
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  5. #5
    Take a look at tutorial vii on this site:

    http://vps2.me/

    Sorry, couldn't resist..

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