I'm trying to keep server resources low. What steps can I take to ensure this?
We are currently hosted on a VPS, and we run perfectly 99% of the time. However, we occasionally get a huge surge in traffic from news articles written (500+ viewers at a time that lasts for hours), which causes terrible load times and SQL errors until the traffic dies down.
What steps can I take to "clean up" and make everything run more efficently? I already plan on increasing the dedicated RAM available, because I believe that is the bottleneck, so correct me if I'm wrong.
Hmm...
Okay, I'll start. I'm assuming that disabling GZip will increase the bandwidth but decrease the server load. Correct?
decrease the queries by turning off some of the plugin those are not in use.
my server load was .7 and i turned of 7 plugins and it went down to 0.02
My server load is 1.59 (according to the numbers at the bottom), but was as high as 21.x eariler. It's been 3-5 most of the day, it's only down that low because we've dropped to 150 users online atm.
Disabled 3 plugins that were not much use, server load dropped to .47. Hmm... that seems pretty steep. Concidence?
Okay guys, I'm getting a crazy amount of traffic the last few days... please help me reduce the CPU usage! I'm sitting at a server load of 17.x+, from the nearly 700 vistors. We've had no less than 150 people online since yesterday.
CPU usages is bouncing between 97 and 100%, with Primary UBC numproc occassionally hitting the hard limit of 600 (was 360 yesterday, had host double our VPS resources). Every time it hits the hard limit, it shuts down. It runs fine with less than 300 people online, but anything over that and it slows to a crawl!
You can try disabling the "Show related threads table" option in "Show Thread Options" of the Board Settings.
You may also want to try to decrease the setting value of "Read Threads in Database (Days)" in the same page as the above setting.
I'm not sure how much by which the server load will be affected, if at all. Go through all the settings and disable what you don't need.
Thanks for the reply. I already have disabled plugins we do not need (we are on 1.18 btw, not 1.2... yet, still skinning and modding on a test server). The related threads addition is very necessary for SEO reasons. I will look into decreasing other values. We are holding above 400 viewers and everything seems to be running smoothly, pages load in under a second with a server load of under 2. However, we will have another crazy spike by morning, I'm sure of that. Anything else, even from the server side of things, that could help reduce the CPU usage, please let me know!
EDIT: Morning came, along with our third promoted story on digg.com in less than 48 hours, along with front page link on Engadget (among others)
We are holding steady with over 500 viewers, so please post any other tips you have for me!
EDIT: 9am CST came, and now we have over 700 viewers, causing the board to slow to a crawl again... when it finally loads, the skin is completely crazy.
