PPCGeeks Update - 10/17/09 1:00pm CST

[geotravelcat]

Thanks guys for all your work! I will try to donate soon!

[raidzero]

Originally Posted by GoodThings2Life

Thanks for the hard work and update, Frosty!

Keep in mind... while upgrading to 8GB of RAM or more will provide a huge benefit, upgrading the processor may not do much good if Apache, MySQL, and PHP can't take advantage of them in multi-thread modes.

Anyway, good luck with it all!

thank you for getting the site running again! I felt lost without it... server upgrades are always "exciting" like that, especially when done out of necessity

[mindfrost82]

Originally Posted by GoodThings2Life

Thanks for the hard work and update, Frosty!

Keep in mind... while upgrading to 8GB of RAM or more will provide a huge benefit, upgrading the processor may not do much good if Apache, MySQL, and PHP can't take advantage of them in multi-thread modes.

Anyway, good luck with it all!

xCache should be able to take advantage of it, which would decrease the load and should really speed things up (in addition to any other upgrades we do).

[Cicatrize]

Originally Posted by GoodThings2Life

Thanks for the hard work and update, Frosty!

Keep in mind... while upgrading to 8GB of RAM or more will provide a huge benefit, upgrading the processor may not do much good if Apache, MySQL, and PHP can't take advantage of them in multi-thread modes.

Anyway, good luck with it all!

True, but having dual processors will definitely reduce the overall load, though.

[Biker1]

Thank you Frosty and Staff, for all your hard work

[chong67]

Do you do this for fun?

I am running my own forum on my home PC and its totally under used. It is running off ASP and SQL Server 2008.

[sirwoogie]

Great site!

First thing you need to do is dump Apache. Go with a lighter weight server such as lighttpd or nginx. Tune your accelerator properly, and if vBulletin can take advantage, use memcached. As for MySQL, get it tuned right and get the disk layout appropriate for your usage.

There should be no reason what you have now can't support your site. I have run things much larger than you have on lesser hardware with loads in the 1-2 range.

[SolApathy]

Thanks for the update, it's really appreciated.

[reddick]

Originally Posted by mindfrost82

I wanted to give everyone a status update on where we stand and the issues we've had the last couple of days.

If you haven't noticed, the server has been up and down for about 3 days now. There were a few corrupted tables in our MySQL database, which have been repaired (this was Wednesday night).

Yesterday the site was down from about 3:30pm CST until about 9pm. I was running some update scripts to update Apache and PHP. Then I had to tweak both again to get the load down. I haven't updated MySQL yet, but I might be doing that when time permits.

Since last night, the site seems to be more stable, but we'll be able to tell more as people get on today.

Page loads might be a little slower than you're used to. I haven't gotten xCache installed with the new version of PHP yet. I wanted to see how things ran without it before I tried to configure that. If things seem to level out, I will be installing this again.

Since last night, the server load has rarely gotten above 6, which is a lot better than its been. Search disables at 10 and you'll get the "Server too busy" message at 15.

Over the last couple of days we were running out of RAM and had high CPU usage, causing us to use the swap space (like 770mb in swap). When I logged in this morning it looks like we have used about 7mb in swap overnight, so that's a huge difference.

Basically, we're starting to outgrow this server (which is at a hosting company). Its a Quad Core Xeon processor with 4gb of RAM.

We have a couple options we will be looking at from this point on:
1) Keep this server and get a 2nd server for either Apache or MySQL.
2) Upgrade this server to Dual Xeon Quad Core processors and increase the RAM (8, 16, 32...whatever we can get).

Eventually I still want to get the FTP off of this server and put it on the cheaper one Mike still has.

But while we're looking at the other options, hopefully the changes I did last night will be enough to hold us over for another week or so.

Thanks again for all your patience while we go through our growing pains!

why dont you try this method http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showp...65&postcount=2 this works good on big boards xcache is a good method to use..most people suggest to separate mysql and apache on a different box for high volume of concurrent connections,but the amount of money you're going to spend on the second box you should spend the money to upgrade on the ram.or switch from apache to nignx server http://nginx.net/ .The best solution is tweaking apache and mysql then look at other alternatives.

good luck

[PropagandaX]

Thank you for all your efforts!!!