Server Capacity

[getstuff4less]

Hello,

We have a Dual Xeon 2.8GHz 2GB 3 x 73GB SCSI from theplanet.com and our ONLY site hosted on that server is our bargainshare.com forums...

The server began to fail at around 2300 people online (mostly guests ) in 30min we had to have ALL CPU saving features on. I noticed your forums had 2600+ people on what does Invision's forums use and what is recommended?

Thanks

[Coastie]

glad to know I have some growing room; Dual Xeon 3.6Ghz, 3x36GB 15krpm Raid5, 5GB Ram

I had no idea what it would handle, and that gives me an idea, thanks.
Much higher number (2300) than I would have thought.

[UBERHOST.NET]

Hello

Just wanted to say that rawks! :)

[getstuff4less]

Thanks kewlceo,

Greytalk: keep in mind that's with all cpu savings turned on...

[marcele]

getstuff4less what php cacher are you using APC or eaccelerator?

[getstuff4less]

I don't think either, I know we have zend.

[Coastie]

I don't think either, I know we have zend.

check your php_info file, if you have phpmyadmin installed, there is a link in there.

I installed eaccelerator about 2 weeks ago, and it made a positive change to my server load. My server load was low, less than .4 an average, but you can still see a change, so it may help you even more. Here is a snapshot where you can see the positive change down to about .25

[marcele]

Well if by zend you only mean zend optimizer then you absolutely need to install either APC or eaccelerator .. it will cut your server load down a lot.

(I recommend APC because it will be included by default in PHP6)

APC - http://pecl.php.net/package/APC
Eaccelerator - http://eaccelerator.net/HomeUk

[.John.]

A little ahead of yourself, don't you think?

PHP6?

[rct2·com]

I installed eaccelerator about 2 weeks ago, and it made a positive change to my server load. My server load was low, less than .4 an average, but you can still see a change, so it may help you even more. Here is a snapshot where you can see the positive change down to about .25

As a mathematics graduate , I'm not sure we can derive a great deal from that picture Coastie. At the very least, you need to compare that load reduction with hits over the same peiod to make sure that the same number of visitors has produced a smaller load.

[Coastie]

I get a better view with a monthly view, but the yearly view shows more over time, which is exactly what you mentioned.
The loads were pretty low to begin with, so that makes it ever harder to see.
Here is another... The dips are nightime traffic, you can see a clear level difference.

[rct2·com]

No you misunderstand. What I'm saying is that the load reduction may be explained by the fact that visitor numbers have suddenly dropped off. You need to make sure that while the load has decreased, visitors have not, otherwise you cannot (with reasonable confidence) directly attribute the server load reduction solely to this software.

[Coastie]

user averages are the same, a real world test like this is better than a staged test. I can see the difference.

[athlonkmf]

If your forum really has so many users at the same time and they're all posting, you have to consider using innoDB instead of myisam for posts, topics, forums and sessions.

If there is a update/insert/delete statement in myisam, the whole table locks until the update/insert/delete is finished. Normally that wouldn't be much of a problem, but if a lot of people do it, that's a lot of locks. And a lot of people "waiting" for the table to get unlocked. These are querylocks, which means connections are left open, which means lotsa resources wasted.

innoDB does rowlocking, so that solves that problem.
(but innoDB is really slow with searches)

You could also disable or severely limit searches, which is quite a resource hog too.

Also, if you put your images on another server, there will be less apache processes, and so less resources used.

Be sure to configure apache and mysql. That is, turn on querycache for mysql, disable keepalive for apache.

For my site I'm using a seperate replication server especially for the searches.