Re: FN-FORUM: Help! Apache server being hammered and site keeps falling over!

date posted 1st November 2007 14:09

On 1 Nov 2007 02:41:26 -0000, Dom Latter [EMAIL REMOVED] wrote:
>
> On Thursday 01 November 2007 00:53:54 Ben Nolan wrote:
> > The server has 4GB of RAM and two reasonably meaty processors. This
> > shouldn't really be happening at all.
>
> This sort of spec should be able to cope with a great deal of traffic.

Quite.

> > We're looking in to putting the MySQL server on a separate machine, as
> > well as possibly load-balancing the website itself with another box.
>
> And this I suspect will not fix the *real* problem.

It'll help in the short term, though. Them What Always Know The
Answer, Especially When They Don't think that the solution is to
rewrite the whole thing so that it uses SQL Server instead of MySQL -
something I will flatly refuse to do, because it's a total waste of
time, and it's not MySQL which is causing the issue.

> > This takes time and money, though; this is more about quick speed
> > fixes, something which the config posted previously seems to have
> > helped with.
>
> If I understood those config changes correctly (didn't look too closely)
> they were just allowing more clients to connect and wait for whatever
> it is waiting for.

I think it's actually allowing less clients, though keepalive is now
on, which may be helping; I'm not really familiar with how it actually
works, just the basics of what it does.

>
> > I'm guessing there's a fairly major memory leak somewhere in the
> > software, but I'm not sure where it is.
>
> Something in the script, I reckon, but not a memory leak.
> Are you connecting to third party servers at all?

Nope. There's a templating system, but it's got built-in caching, and
it seems to have very little impact on page generation time. The
whole thing is very modular in design, mostly being implemented using
objects, and I'm wondering if this is causing it.