Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Help with server overload

[purgatori]

These are my specs for my current server:
Dedicated:

Brand Dell PowerEdge 210
CPU Intel Xeon 3065
CPU Cores 2
CPU Power 2.33 GHz
HDD 500GB SATA
RAM 2GB ECC
Port Speed 1GBPS Unshared


I have a pretty large forum with about 60,000 users and 2.5 million post. Today my server was fairly bogged down all day. Very slow. I'm running apache/nginx. My usage was up to about 800 members at once. It is a vbulletin forum.

Are their any suggestions you guys would have to make my site run fast? I know very little about servers and I have server management. I basically just work in the backend of vbulletin..I am a newb when it comes to servers.

Thanks in advance.

[Serverfruit-Kris]

Two things that stuck me is that it only have 2 GB RAM, and you have SATA. My recommendation is to upgrade RAM, and change to SAS 15K RPM (cheapest) or SSD (fastest). It might require some downtime. Ask the hosting company. Also I recommend getting RAID 10 but then you might need at least 4 disks + RAID controller. You can get disks with lower disk space though.

[purgatori]

Originally Posted by lakridserne

Two things that stuck me is that it only have 2 GB RAM, and you have SATA. My recommendation is to upgrade RAM, and change to SAS 15K RPM (cheapest) or SSD (fastest). It might require some downtime. Ask the hosting company. Also I recommend getting RAID 10 but then you might need at least 4 disks + RAID controller. You can get disks with lower disk space though.

I ordered a ram upgrade when I first came to the host but they were out of stock. I added 4 more gigs of ram but i'm waiting for delivery. My server manager says ram isn't the issue though?

http://i.xsltel.com/5bseao.png

[purgatori]

Also if it helps..My site was down for 4 months and I just brought it back this week. I had a bad experience with a new host and had to move a few days a go. Here are specs from today.
1,506
Visits

21,315
Pageviews

14.15
Pages/Visit

19.32%
Bounce Rate

00:20:52
Avg. Time on Site

73.51%
% New Visits

[Orien]

RAM doesn't seem to be the issue. I'd wager that your CPU/hard drive are being thrashed by mysql.

Can you post the output of "free -m" or ask your server manager to do so?

[purgatori]

Sure and thanks

[root@reverse ~]# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3955 2349 1606 0 143 1181
-/+ buffers/cache: 1025 2930
Swap: 8095 329 7765

[speedbus]

Use a caching plugin or Varnish ? and replace Apache with Cherokee, Apache must be consuming a lot of RAM and also slowing down your site, Cherokee can handle more load and users.

[purgatori]

I agree with you. Apache has never handled the traffic on my site well. The best speeds I had with even more traffic was with litespeed. I donn't mind paying if it helps my server.

[speedbus]

Originally Posted by purgatori

I agree with you. Apache has never handled the traffic on my site well. The best speeds I had with even more traffic was with litespeed. I donn't mind paying if it helps my server.

Cherokee is better, it can handle a lot more load, check this :
http://arnisoft.com/239/server-bench...ginx-cherokee/

[Dr_Michael]

Do you optimize often your database tables?

[dzhorov]

I was just about to offer the same thing. If you haven't done so in a while, you can try and optimize and repair your forum database which can indeed improve perfomance. Just make sure that you're doing that when your forum is least busy since I believe your database is quite large. Also, you may consider MySQL server optimization, if you have not done that as well.

[purgatori]

Thanks for answers. I will try out the suggestions.

If i decide to upgrade the server..I do have 4 gigs going to 6. I should go for hard drive and cpu? That would be the most beneficial?

[Dr_Michael]

SAS disks are much faster than SATA disks, and it would improve your performance. Also, try to catch which queries are causing issues. One way is by enabling the MySQL slow queries log.
Another way is to use scripts. If you are interested for a free script, I do have one to send you.

[purgatori]

Please i"m interested in anything that can help. Thank you