Problem with my dedicated server
 

Hi there,

My photo galleries are on a dedicated server hosted by servermatrix.

On days I get listed by World sex and other big tgp’s, the thumbnails on my galleries often load very slowly, especially when the stats programs (urchin) are about to run.

What’s the reason for this? Is it simply a matter of extra memory? (At the moment I’ve got 1 gig of RAM).

Or has it got something to do with the Apache server configuration?

The guys at Servermatrix are not sure themselves what’s the cause of the often bad performance.

According to some it’s simply a matter of insufficient memory (at the moment the server has 1 gig of RAM) while others say that the performance of the server will improve by changing the Apache configuration.

What do you think could be the reason? Any ideas how I can improve the performance of the server?

Greetz,

Abra,

PS I’m pretty sure it’s not insfufficient bandwith

I got a server with Urchin installed and it always seems slow to me at busy times, and it ain't got nowhere near the kind of traffic that you're talking about. I've spoken to the host (NTT Verio) about it and they have no idea why.

Perhaps you could talk to cd34 (Chris) who posts here. He's more qualified than anyone I know regarding Apache and server optimisation.

When it happens, ssh into the server and do:

free
iostat 5 5
vmstat 5 5
uptime
uname -a
ps ax | wc -l
ps ax | grep -Ei '(apache|httpd)'|wc -l

and post those.

Is the site doing anything dynamic? i.e. some php script that is calling the database? if so, check your slow-query log around the same time as the events happen.

Its also possible that the server is bogged down with DNS requests since you mention it happens when urchin is running. Log files could be overly large causing slowdowns. Many different possibilities.

When stats are running they can take up a lot of resources. TGP servers are the worst because the files get so large. Urchin was never designed to run with other applications so I don't think it's the most efficient thing to have on your server. I still prefer the stats from Wusage which costs much less and doesn't seem to use as many resources.

Any stats package running on a busy gallery server can slow it down but it shouldn't effect the surfers if you're not doing any dynamic page delivery.