Server advice for an idiot please

[Day_]

First of all I'm a complete idiot when it comes to servers, I know how to pay for one, create an account, upload a site and away I go, nothing else ever gets touched.

I have a VPS with Heart Internet,
4 cores (was on 3 prior to last night)
GenuineIntel
QEMU Virtual CPU version (cpu64-rhel6)
Speed: 2393.998 MHz
Cache: 4096 KB

3gig memory

50gig hard drive

I also have WebHost Manager.

Last night was one of our what should of been busiest times as it's a football forum and we played a local rival. We usually hit around 60 members and 150 guests on a Saturday and have no problems, during the week around 100 people online at all times. Last night we have an extra 50 or so guests and the site went into a crawl. I logged into WHM to check the server status and the server load was at 111.2, usually it's around 0.50.

In a panic I upgraded to 5 cores to see if that would lower the server load, it hardly made a difference so I lowered to 4 as it's already around £60pm as it is.

I contact Heart Internet this morning and was told that 4 cores should be fine but I'd need to upgrade my memory for busy periods last night, the thing is on my previous server I only had 2 gig memory and we had 389 online and it ran fine?

Search is disabled for guests, they can't view the member list or member profiles and I've now disabled guests viewing posts and the server load is at 2.40.

The server is unmanaged and I have done nothing with it, should my current specs be enough to run my forum, do I need to upgrade or do I simply need to make changes to the server?

I have read threads in this board and it's all way over my head so please talk to me like an idiot as it's the only way I'd understand.

Thanks

[Connor T]

Your specs look fine for that amount of load. I have a few questions

• Do you run a php opcode cacher?
• Do you run pure apache or something else?
• What is your php handler? (mod_php, mod_fcgid, suphp, etc)
  

I've been working with mod_fcgid for the past month and been learning how to tweak that thing so it can handle tons of request. I'm not sure I want to recommend it, since you don't seem to have experience, but maybe we can help tweak your my.cnf and httpd.conf to fix this up.

[Day_]

Your specs look fine for that amount of load. I have a few questions

• Do you run a php opcode cacher?
• Do you run pure apache or something else?
• What is your php handler? (mod_php, mod_fcgid, suphp, etc)
  

I've been working with mod_fcgid for the past month and been learning how to tweak that thing so it can handle tons of request. I'm not sure I want to recommend it, since you don't seem to have experience, but maybe we can help tweak your my.cnf and httpd.conf to fix this up.

Do you run a php opcode cacher?
No idea, how can I find this out if I'am?

Do you run pure apache or something else?
Just Apache

What is your php handler? (mod_php, mod_fcgid, suphp, etc)
PHP5 and suphp

Thanks

[Connor T]

Can I see these values from your httpd conf?

StartServers
Min Spare Servers
Max Spare Servers
Server Limit
Max Clients
Max Requests per Child
Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive Timeout
Max Keep-Alive Requests
Timeout

I don't think suPHP allows Opcode caching, its main benefit is just security in my opinion. If your the only website on your little slice, I'd recommend researching other handlers. I don't know how to optimize suPHP at all.

[Day_]

Can I see these values from your httpd conf?

StartServers

Min Spare Servers

Max Spare Servers

Server Limit

Max Clients

Max Requests per Child

Keep-Alive

Keep-Alive Timeout

Max Keep-Alive Requests

Timeout

I don't think suPHP allows Opcode caching, its main benefit is just security in my opinion. If your the only website on your little slice, I'd recommend researching other handlers. I don't know how to optimize suPHP at all.

How to I view my httpd conf? I've just been Googling which has only given me an headache, I've found the location of it through Putty /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf but have no idea how to get there

[co19]

For the price, I would say go with a low end dedicated server. With my experience a VPS can barely handle any increase in load and is pretty unstable (depending on the other people using it). I've switched back and forth multiple times, and every time the dedicated will run perfectly, no matter the specs, while the VPS will be by default much slower. I've used leaseweb and snelserver in the past and both are great!

Oh and for 100 people, a dual core with 4gb of memory will be the optimal amount, but you can easily get away with 2gb. Quad core is also nice, but just overkill.

[Grumpy]

Unmanaged VPS for 60 GBP? You're overpaying dude. That's like the price of a managed highend vps right there for many providers.

Also, if you're not using as much resource as before and getting load spikes, it means there's an abusive customer hogging all the resources and you get crappy performance. The resources given to you are not dedicated. It happens. With good companies, they keep this behavior to a minimum. With bad companies, the abusive users run wild.
The fact that they give you 4 cores in a vps is quite meaningless. If a machine is quad core and they sell the box to 40 people. That's 0.1 core per person. Now, if you have access to 1 core and each person uses 10% of it or 4 cores and use 2.5% of it really makes no difference. Unfortunately, share rate is not something your host is going to share with you. But if you have access to 4 cores, well, there's more room to abuse. :tongue:

Because ram is often dedicated in a VPS environment, memory is pretty much the only valuable measuring tool.

Disk is the most frequently abused shared resource. And from the host side, this is unfortunately hard to even regulate unlike the CPU.

--------------
My suggestion to you is move. Go somewhere that's managed and will tweak your settings to help make it more optimal. You might even end up paying less. I don't think I'm allowed to recommend hosts in this forum though. Other than to say.. go look at webhostingtalk.com.

I wouldn't recommend dedicated, since you can't seem to manage it perfectly. Too many potential problems that may end up just costing you more. WHM on dedi also costs 3x more than on VPS. Management on dedi also costs way more than a VPS 3~10x more.

[raindog308]

I would agree with Grumpy. If you don't know how to manage a server, you should get a managed VPS.

I would hop over to webhostingtalk.com and ask around, or look at IPS's hosting.

[Aussie Cable]

How to I view my httpd conf? I've just been Googling which has only given me an headache, I've found the location of it through Putty /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf but have no idea how to get there

After SSH'ing to the file you can view it by using cat (typing the following into your putty window), like so:

cat /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf[/CODE]

If you require editing, use vi or nano as an editor:

[CODE]vi /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf

or

nano /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf[/code]

Hope that helps.

[Rhett]

The problem with a VPS is it's still sharing resources, no matter what "spin" is put on it, if the box is over sold, you will experience issues that are not always related to your own site. Often times people hunt down these items for weeks thinking... "it's a VPS, it has to be my site causing these loads" when in fact, it's not related to your site at all. I'm not saying that this is the case every time, however more often than not it is.

Also worth noting, a managed server is always going to be the best route if your not a server admin or don't take the time to learn properly, most hacked sites these days are due to you're neither Joe, getting a new server and self managing it, not keeping it up to date and not configuring it properly. Spend a little extra, get it done by a professional, and focus your time on managing and growing your site. :smile:

I would suggest for any mid size and larger forum to go with a dedicated server, dedicated servers come in all shaped and sizes, you can get a small one for 100.00 a month all the way up to a few thousand per month depending on your needs. In the end, it's worth the extra money to be in total control of your resources.

[raindog308]

I hear what Rhett is saying, but...

If you're going to go to a dedicated server, don't go low-end. Low-end dedicated servers often do not have redundant drives, have weak processors, etc. Many mid-range VPSes from good providers who don't oversubscribe their nodes will smoke low-end dedicated.

If you are going to get a VPS, read a lot of reviews. I've never used a VPS that didn't come with glowing reviews and I've always been happy :sorcerer:

[Day_]

After SSH'ing to the file you can view it by using cat (typing the following into your putty window), like so:

cat /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf[/CODE]

If you require editing, use vi or nano as an editor:

[CODE]vi /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf

or

nano /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf[/code]

Hope that helps.

Can I see these values from your httpd conf?

StartServers

Min Spare Servers

Max Spare Servers

Server Limit

Max Clients

Max Requests per Child

Keep-Alive

Keep-Alive Timeout

Max Keep-Alive Requests

Timeout

I don't think suPHP allows Opcode caching, its main benefit is just security in my opinion. If your the only website on your little slice, I'd recommend researching other handlers. I don't know how to optimize suPHP at all.

That's great cheers! StartServers: 5 Min Spare Servers: 5 Max Spare Servers: 10 Server Limit: 256 Max Clients: 150 Max Requests per child: 10000 Keep-Alive: off Keep-Alive Timeout: 5 Max Keep-Alive Requests: 100 Timeout: 300 With regards to the dedicated server mentioned above it's something I will look at, Heart Internet who I'm with now have dedicated servers starting from 2.33Ghz Dual Core Xeon 4gig Ram 2x 160 GB SATA (160 GB Usable Space) Unlimited Bandwidth £80pm with webmin or + £20 for cPanel Does that seem like a decent deal?

[Grumpy]

£80pm with webmin or + £20 for cPanel

Does that seem like a decent deal?

Unamanged? No, doesn't seem like a good deal at all. You weren't paying decent rates for vps from this company, not sure why you'd consider the same company to give a good deal on their dedi.
If you love their service and aren't strapped for cash, go right ahead. Finding a company you like is much more important than finding the best price. But you can't seem to afford managed, so I don't understand why you're upgrading to dedi server now. It is HARDER to manage a dedicated server than a vps (therefore, higher management price for dedis). With vps, all the core stuff are handled for you. Now you must do everything.
My suggestion stays with finding a managed vps server in europe. Anywhere in western europe will be blazing fast to the UK. So you don't have to limit to UK only either.

As for your settings...
server limit is most definitely too high... Though, lack the stats to say what you should have.
max clients is most definitely too high... ditto
Though, lower these will only prevent hangs and slow downs as they serve 503 errors to overflow of traffic....

If you want to improve performance, you need to remove suphp and go with something like mod_php (i recommend this over mod_fcgi b/c imo it's more newbie friendly) and then install apc extension to php. And then add the apc info to invision power config. There's a tutorial for that somewhere in invision documentations. That will probably speed up your website by multiple factors.

suphp is most secure when running multiple websites, but if that's not needed, there's no need to run like this.

[Rhett]

I hear what Rhett is saying, but...

If you're going to go to a dedicated server, don't go low-end. Low-end dedicated servers often do not have redundant drives, have weak processors, etc. Many mid-range VPSes from good providers who don't oversubscribe their nodes will smoke low-end dedicated.

If you are going to get a VPS, read a lot of reviews. I've never used a VPS that didn't come with glowing reviews and I've always been happy :sorcerer:

As with any hosting provider, there are good ones and bad... and you can in fact get a small dedicated in the 150 range with raid one etc..