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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
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    64

    Knownhost VPS - initial impressions

    I have only been using a VPS for about one month. My host is Knownhost and the plan is their VPS Triple Xtx plan at the California data center. It comes with 448 MB RAM, burst to 2048 MB, and cpanel was my choice of control interfaces. Cpanel was mostly to make transferring my site easier, but I am used to it anyway. My previous experience is with dedicated servers (command line and cpanel) and shared hosting. The plan was $75 per month, but I found a coupon here on Webhostingtalk that reduced that to around $55.

    My site runs about 800K pageviews to nearly a million per month. It usually uses about 300 GB of bandwidth and has a SMF message board (MySQL database) with 100K+ posts (users online, often about 10 to 15). Most pages on the site make extensive use of PHP, but not for anything too taxing - setting up the pages to display per templates and navigation is the main use of PHP. It does run phpadsnew for all ads.

    At first, I was getting quality of service reports due to memory. A quick ticket to tech support and a few hours later an admin confirmed that I should add on some more dedicated memory to my package. He also gave me a few helpful suggestions to get my feet wet with using a VPS. I added 256 MB RAM for another $12.50 per month and did some tweaking. The server has not had a QOS report since and the performance improved noticeably. Using the site, I would not be able to tell the difference between it and a dedicated. Knownhost did a good job answering my questions beforehand, including telling me that I might need to upgrade the RAM when I described my site.

    I will try to stop by here in a few months to provide an update.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
    Posts
    50
    Hello,

    You could also improve the speed, reduce the load and reduce the memory usage very noticeably by using well known tricks, like using php in fastcgi mode suexec'd in apache and use a php accelerator like eaccelerator.
    PHP boards take the most advantage of that and you would notice amazing improvements if everything is fine tunned.
    I'm pretty sure that you would not need the memory upgrade with some tunning like that, I'm hosting a vbulletin board with around 1000 active users in a VPS with 384 MB RAM, and it never touches the 384 limit, it always keeps with 20 to 80 MB free of the 384, and with cpu loads from 0.1 to 0.4 average, and you cant find a vbulletin board as fast as that one in surfing speed.

    Regards,
    Rui

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Sep 2005
    Posts
    507
    Quote Originally Posted by RMSSF
    You could also improve the speed, reduce the load and reduce the memory usage very noticeably by using well known tricks, like using php in fastcgi mode suexec'd in apache and use a php accelerator like eaccelerator.
    Can someone elaborate on this? Not being technical, I am thinking there must be cons when using these tricks? Analogy is when you make a car go faster (through a turbo, super charge or better gas), there is more wear and tear on the engine. Horse power has to come from somewhere. Not sure if web servers follow the same rules so I am asking. What are the pros and cons of the above tricks?

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Oct 2006
    Location
    New York, NY
    Posts
    1,041
    Quote Originally Posted by mealto
    Can someone elaborate on this? Not being technical, I am thinking there must be cons when using these tricks? Analogy is when you make a car go faster (through a turbo, super charge or better gas), there is more wear and tear on the engine. Horse power has to come from somewhere. Not sure if web servers follow the same rules so I am asking. What are the pros and cons of the above tricks?
    Generally, you shouldn't compare a car to a Linux VPS. If you do though, keep in mind there are Geo Metro's of VPS's and Mercedes Benz's as well.

    The "tricks" mentioned above are just basic cues to different functionality you can introduce into your VPS to give it better performance.

    It depends really on what your doing with the VPS for these things to apply. For example, if your not serving a heavy duty forum, than you generally don't need to install eaccelerator or suexec php via fastcgi. FastCGI is a program you can google and install on your vps, and get working with your httpd (apache, lighthttpd, etc). Same goes for eaccelerator.

    Adding functionality can always break functionality somewhere else, so just be careful, and test, test, test and keep testing some more before your ready to go production. But once your linux/unix/bsd/sunos machine/vps/node is properly configured, and is doing what you want, you really don't need maintenace after that, unless you need to patch something or upgrade a version of some component. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, says I.

    There's a reason most financial houses and banks rely on Unix machines, including Linux, because once they are up and running and performing a function or running a specific app, theres no reason for them to go down, unless of course for your occasional hardware failure (and maybe a memory leak here and there, but thats the programmers fault ).

    -Sean

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
    Posts
    50
    I think going through an exaustive technical explanation on how to implement those tricks fall out of the subject of WHT.
    You can google everything easy.
    Just some hints though...
    Compile apache with suexec enabled in cpanel, download and make an install tree of the latest php and compile it manually, not in cpanel as there are some build options that cpanel simply seems to ignore for php build.
    Give a different prefix for php so you have both modes available in your system, like '--prefix=/usr/local/php-fcgi', you will need to tell it where to find php.ini after or make a symbolic link to php.ini.
    Here is the options I've used:
    "./configure --enable-fastcgi --prefix=/usr/local --with-xml --enable-bcmath --enable-calendar --enable-ftp --with-gd
    --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local --with-png-dir=/usr --with-xpm-dir=/usr/X11R6 --enable-memory-limit --enable-magic-quotes --with-mysqli
    --with-mysql=/usr --with-pear --enable-sockets --enable-track-vars --with-ttf --with-freetype-dir=/usr --enable-gd-native-ttf --with-zlib
    --enable-force-cgi-redirect"


    But here is a nice explanation of the whole thing: http://www.morph3ous.net/2006/08/03/...gi-and-cpanel/
    Personally I recomend 'export PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=0' for stability and better control using the mod_fastcgi in apache.

    Keep in mind though that the fastcgi 'trick' is not for the general server usage of I think the most users of this forum, so if you use your server for shared webhosting or shared reselling then definitelly forget the fastcgi and continue using the normal mod_php that comes by default, or you will most likelly have a performance and stability degradation.
    Like seankoons said, it is better suitted for servers with the main purpose of hosting a busy php website.

    Rui

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
    Posts
    50
    I forgot to mention that if anyone wish to use eaccelerator together with last versions of vbulletin, probably will want to add this to php.ini to fix an incompatibility that causes problems:
    eaccelerator.filter="*.php !class_bbcode_alt.php"

    I believe both eaccelerator and vbulletin teams are working on how to fix it, but for now with that filter as workaround everything gets smooth and stable.

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Oct 2006
    Location
    New York, NY
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    1,041
    Quote Originally Posted by RMSSF
    I forgot to mention that if anyone wish to use eaccelerator together with last versions of vbulletin, probably will want to add this to php.ini to fix an incompatibility that causes problems:
    eaccelerator.filter="*.php !class_bbcode_alt.php"

    I believe both eaccelerator and vbulletin teams are working on how to fix it, but for now with that filter as workaround everything gets smooth and stable.
    Nice instruction set! It should definately help the newcomers to Linux who are looking to optimize their setup.

    -Sean

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Sep 2005
    Posts
    507
    Thanks for all the insight everyone. Sean, good responses, thank you.

    These technical upgrades are way beyond me. Let's see if the VPS host can help. We need someone who can go in and optimize the setup. I think you were the one who pointed out that most VPS host gives out a default setup that may not be optimized.

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
    Posts
    64
    The system is running eAccelerator. I went ahead and upgraded to PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5.0 to see if that helped. It did seem to make a difference in performance, though the memory usage appeared to remain the same. What also seemed to make a difference is changing some tables for my message board to InnoDB and all of the tables for my phpAdsNew server to InnoDB.

    Well, that and noticing I had not turned on eAccelerator for the SMF message board. Rather stupid of me.

    Not seeing any performance problems now, but I am trying to locate good suggestions for baseline settings in my.cnf for the InnoDB tables. I have not asked Knownhost yet, because I prefer to only bother my host if I am stuck.
    Andrew Borntreger
    Champion of Cinematic Disasters
    The Bad Movie Website
    www.badmovies.org

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Jan 2006
    Posts
    1,922
    Quote Originally Posted by Badmovies
    The system is running eAccelerator. I went ahead and upgraded to PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5.0 to see if that helped. It did seem to make a difference in performance, though the memory usage appeared to remain the same. What also seemed to make a difference is changing some tables for my message board to InnoDB and all of the tables for my phpAdsNew server to InnoDB.

    Well, that and noticing I had not turned on eAccelerator for the SMF message board. Rather stupid of me.

    Not seeing any performance problems now, but I am trying to locate good suggestions for baseline settings in my.cnf for the InnoDB tables. I have not asked Knownhost yet, because I prefer to only bother my host if I am stuck.
    First, it is good to hear things are going well for you. Second, contact us anytime for assistance. That is what we are here for.

    -Jay
    KnownHost Managed VPS Specialists
    Toll Free: (866)-332-9894
    Fully Managed VPS, Wordpress, Cloud Servers, and Dedicated Servers

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
    Posts
    64
    Quote Originally Posted by Knownhost - J
    First, it is good to hear things are going well for you. Second, contact us anytime for assistance. That is what we are here for.

    -Jay
    Thank you. I went ahead and put in a support ticket. Really pleased with the VPS. I have been unable to tell it from a small dedicated as far as performance, though I needed to learn the little tricks with it like user_beancounters and such.
    Andrew Borntreger
    Champion of Cinematic Disasters
    The Bad Movie Website
    www.badmovies.org

  12. #12
    Join Date
    Jan 2006
    Posts
    1,922
    Quote Originally Posted by Badmovies
    Thank you. I went ahead and put in a support ticket. Really pleased with the VPS. I have been unable to tell it from a small dedicated as far as performance, though I needed to learn the little tricks with it like user_beancounters and such.
    Not a problem. Have a nice day.

    -Jay
    KnownHost Managed VPS Specialists
    Toll Free: (866)-332-9894
    Fully Managed VPS, Wordpress, Cloud Servers, and Dedicated Servers

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