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Thread: New server or more RAM?
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10-24-2006, 05:25 PM #1Junior Guru Wannabe
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New server or more RAM?
I'm currently on an AMD Barton 3000+ with 2GB of RAM. During peak traffic times everyday, the server has started to reach a load of 30+, so I obviously need to upgrade. The problem is that I'm not sure whether I need more CPU power or more RAM. The server originally had 1GB of RAM and 90%+ of that memory was being used up all the time, I then upgraded to 2GB of RAM and I don't think it made much difference but the server still used up 90%+ of the memory.
Here's an example of top (during high traffic load):
top - 22:14:57 up 45 days, 22:37, 1 user, load average: 20.90, 23.70, 27.16
Tasks: 285 total, 19 running, 265 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.7% us, 10.6% sy, 88.7% ni, 0.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 2010432k total, 1651704k used, 358728k free, 57312k buffers
Swap: 1959920k total, 6708k used, 1953212k free, 1031996k cached
I'm thinking of upgrading to an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4200 - will this make more difference than adding some more RAM to my original server?
Thanks in advance for any help.
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10-24-2006, 07:11 PM #2Ex-Hoster
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I think load problem can be solved buy upgrading CPU not Ram. But I am not sure...
Kind regards
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10-24-2006, 07:13 PM #3Web Hosting Master
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well hold on...
you've got high load - you've got no iowait, you've still got ram spare..
what version of apache are you running? is it threading? if so how many threads per server, and how many servers?
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10-24-2006, 07:50 PM #4Disabled
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before you do all that, have you tried to look at your logs to see if there is any errors ?
also, have you added php and apache mods like zend and ea both and my.cnf mods
( will cut loads by 40-60% )
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10-24-2006, 08:10 PM #5Junior Guru Wannabe
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Originally Posted by Slidey
Originally Posted by Ivan23
Many thanks for the help so far.
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10-25-2006, 01:30 AM #6Web Hosting Master
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Cpu(s): 0.7% us, 10.6% sy, 88.7% ni, ...
Interesting, 10.6% used by system and 88.7% niced? What processes are you running with nice priority? Typically those are background processes that use spare CPU time. 10% used by system seem high. It would appear that you're spawning and killing lots of processes (hence the 10% system overhead) or something of that nature. The bottom line is that <1% is used by the actual user-land processes (i.e. Apache, etc.) so no wonder the run queue is full of processes wanting to run when they don't get anything done.
Something is definitely strange... but it doesn't look like the CPU is outgrown, just something is misconfigured. Well, just my opinion given the limited data.Pings <1 ms, Unlimited Transfer, Lowest Price: http://localhost/
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10-25-2006, 03:19 AM #7
Is this server using mysql/php at all? Have you verified that there is , in fact, no problems with the website code on the server itself?
If you're normally running sites with no problem, but occasionally it gets to load down, look at what's causing the load itself, don't just blame the hardware.
How many sites are on the server? Obviously if it's just a few you don't need to upgrade hardware, but figure out what the problem is with the code itself.Tom Whiting, WHMCS Guru extraordinaire
Linux problems? WHMCS Problems? Give me a shout
Check out my WHMCS Addons
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10-25-2006, 06:18 AM #8Junior Guru Wannabe
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Originally Posted by linux-tech
Originally Posted by lukiLast edited by Bashaar; 10-25-2006 at 06:22 AM.