Would you rather???

[SJ77]

I need  a whole new server.  There are many configurations in my price range for new server hardware but I can't focus on everything.  My site is popular and current server can't handle the load. It's SLOW. I need to know where to put my dollars so I ask this. 

If given a choice would you rather have your server dollars go toward 

1. CPU power

       - More cores or faster clock?

2. More memory? I have 12GB now

 

3. Faster I/O

      - 4 SSD RAID drives, SAS .. ? Or can I get by with less drives and focus on memory?

 

1,2 or 3 where should I put my dollars... ??? Your opinion please. Thank you

 

 

[ASTRAPI]

You should check what your server needs more.

No one can guess without checking from inside.

 

[Daniel F]

What are your current specs?

 

IMO you'll not be lucky with a new one if you're missing the knowledge to manage it and you don't get a managed server or somebody who'll manage it for you.

[SJ77]

Before I get the "it's hard to say unless we know your specific bottle neck blah blah" Pretend you are going to be running an unknown IPS site and you have some money to purchase a server. Where to you focus your dollars?

5 minutes ago, ASTRAPI said:

You should check what your server needs more.

No one can guess without checking from inside.

 

In general what's the best use of money for servers. That's really all I am trying to ask.

[Ioannis D]

The first thing I focus on are network speed and hard drive (SSD).

The second are CPU and RAM

And third most important is the configuration, LAMP? LEMP? etc etc.

This is my opinion.

[ASTRAPI]

I know that it will not help but i can try to explain a bit more.

In my opinion when you start an IPS forum you are going with a simple vps with minimum 1 gb ram and you will be fine

But a starting forum is not your case .

In another words i will get a good cpu as fast cpu is a must and do the main job.

I will a get a lot of ram as it helps with caching.

I will get a good ssd as it will transfer very fast my images and in general files for the users.

I will get a good connection to transfer all the above fast.

 

Does the above helps? No

 

That's why i recommend you to measure what you have and find what exactly you need.

It will be good to post your current server specs so we may be able to spot something that will help.

 

We should also know what kind of software you use...

e.x: Apache? Needs more ram

e.x Nginx? Needs less ram

and so on...

 

Or if you want just let us know your budget and we will try to find something good for you.

 

[ASTRAPI]

Your site index is loading very slow !!!!

The server is in Us and i am not close at it but i am sure that's not the case as it takes more than 20 sec for me.

You are missing some images also:

http://www.lovethesecurves.com/uploads/monthly_2015_11/promo1.thumb.jpg.7cf1de67a5909edfc8678709c734abd0.jpg 404 (Not Found)
http://www.lovethesecurves.com/uploads/monthly_2015_11/promo3.thumb.jpg.556c5600a68800c225282c0c1e7791c4.jpg 404 (Not Found)
http://www.lovethesecurves.com/uploads/monthly_2015_11/promo2.thumb.jpg.96368d2c544ae766ad9f762ea45901bd.jpg 404 (Not Found)

You have 88 requests and page size 1,6MB and that's fine.

Also i can see 477 Users were Online in the Last 24 Hours and Total Topics 19,044 Total Posts 520,509 with Who's Online   9 Members, 0 Anonymous, 16 Guests ...

So i think that you have a bad software configuration.

I can run really fast this forum with a simple vps and 2 gb ram.

Your 12gb ram with multi core cpu and raid ssd is more than enough....

 

You may try also Cloudflare is free.

[RevengeFNF]

24 members online and 4 guests, and your board took 25 seconds to load for me...

This is not a hardware problem, its a software issue, a big one. 

[SJ77]

2 hours ago, ASTRAPI said:

Your site index is loading very slow !!!!

The server is in Us and i am not close at it but i am sure that's not the case as it takes more than 20 sec for me.

You are missing some images also:

http://www.lovethesecurves.com/uploads/monthly_2015_11/promo1.thumb.jpg.7cf1de67a5909edfc8678709c734abd0.jpg 404 (Not Found)
http://www.lovethesecurves.com/uploads/monthly_2015_11/promo3.thumb.jpg.556c5600a68800c225282c0c1e7791c4.jpg 404 (Not Found)
http://www.lovethesecurves.com/uploads/monthly_2015_11/promo2.thumb.jpg.96368d2c544ae766ad9f762ea45901bd.jpg 404 (Not Found)

You have 88 requests and page size 1,6MB and that's fine.

Also i can see 477 Users were Online in the Last 24 Hours and Total Topics 19,044 Total Posts 520,509 with Who's Online   9 Members, 0 Anonymous, 16 Guests ...

So i think that you have a bad software configuration.

I can run really fast this forum with a simple vps and 2 gb ram.

Your 12gb ram with multi core cpu and raid ssd is more than enough....

 

You may try also Cloudflare is free.

Same server www.curvage.org can you provide more analysis after looking at this site also?

 

[SJ77]

Also @ASTRAPI my cpu is Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           E5520  @ 2.27GHz. X2.  And It has 12GB ram and 4 1TB HHD SATA. 

[RevengeFNF]

@superj707 how much average ram is occupied on your server? Load average? Io stats? 

You would benefit a lot from an ssd, thats for sure. 

Can you also tell us a bit of your configuration? Like, Apache or Nginx? Opcache enabled? 

Your server should be good enough to run both forums without a problem. 

[SJ77]

On  Nginx. Curvage has a lot of users. 

here is vmstat @RevengeFNF

procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa
 3  3  48628 3126776      0 3913132    0    0     2     1    0    0  2  0 16 82
 3  2  48628 3094436      0 3939132    0    0    16  1466    0 4193 24  3 68  5
 0  1  48628 2993752      0 4030932    0    0    21     9    0 1398  7  1 88  3
 0  2  48628 3135428      0 3913600    0    0     0   162    0 3464 16  4 72  8
12  1  48628 3052028      0 3913856    0    0    34  1122    0 7997 37  9 51  3
 3  1  48628 3110040      0 3914000    0    0     6   429    0 7737 39  9 49  3
 3  2  48628 3146092      0 3914584    0    0    90   167    0 4987 34  6 59  2
 6  0  48628 3108220      0 3914692    0    0     0  1452    0 4310 28  4 62  5
 2  1  48628 3125272      0 3915072    0    0    61    32    0 3684 26  3 68  3
 6  0  48628 3071724      0 3916132    0    0   199  1105    0 3678 28  2 66  3

vmstat doesn't actually look too bad

w

 22:20:58 up 335 days,  1:06,  1 user,  load average: 8.82, 9.55, 9.20
USER     TTY      FROM             LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
####     pts/4    c##### .h 20:45    0.00s  0.04s  0.00s w

[RevengeFNF]

@superj707 My opinion only. I think it possible or feasible to run both forums in that server. 

I have configured a server that although have an SSD and more Ram, it only have a single Xeon CPU. You have 2 with a total of 16 threads.

That forum have around 1500 users online at all times. This is the current load of the server: Load average: 0.33 0.31 0.28 

Like you see, its 100% possible to run the forums on your server.

 

But if you really want to buy a new server,  i suggest a server with SSD. You don't need RAID with 4 drives(unless its raid 1 for security). If your ram is always full, buy at least 16Gb. 

[ASTRAPI]

Can you please run also top and post results here?

www.curvage.org works better even with more users online.....

May i know also how much you pay for your current server so i can come back with my final recommendation?

If you can pay more just post the final budget that is ok for you per month

 

[sasiko]

u should consider hiring these guys posting in this topic here or ask makoto for server management. they will likely find the cause of the slow load and fix it for you. dont try to buy a new server to tempoarily bypass the issue.

[sudo]

CPU is always first on the list for me, it literally affects all php/mysql processing and that is usually the biggest bottleneck of any site.

Ram is next then network. SSD is a nice feature but unless you have a shortage of ram or a huge amount of IO it wont really help much as linux caches frequently accessed files automatically into RAM. MySQL also will swallow up plenty of ram to boost speed so its pretty important.

Take a look at http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html and you can use that for some baseline comparison, obviously that is a pure stress test number with maximum usage across all cores etc but it does give some indications in a raw form.

Site optimisations will help load times for users but I presume you have a poor ttfb which is helped most by a faster cpu.

We use AWS now for most of our hosting which is expensive and not quite as fast per £ of spend but you can scale up/down during different points once you have a multi server structure going and they also can host mysql for you.

[BlackNovaDesigns]

Here is a couple of things slowing your website down on Love these curves.

RECOMMENDATION	GRADE	TYPE	PRIORITY
Specify image dimensions	F (0)	IMAGES	HIGH
Defer parsing of JavaScript	F (7)	JS	HIGH
Enable gzip compression	F (14)	SERVER	HIGH
Optimize images	D (66)	IMAGES	HIGH
Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding header	D (68)	SERVER	HIGH
Remove query strings from static resources	C (70)	CONTENT	HIGH
Avoid bad requests	C (77)	CONTENT	HIGH

 

RECOMMENDATION	GRADE	TYPE	PRIORITY
Compress components with gzip	F (0)	SERVER	HIGH
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)	F (0)	SERVER	MEDIUM
Make fewer HTTP requests	F (40)	CONTENT	HIGH
Use cookie-free domains	F (0)	COOKIE	LOW
Reduce the number of DOM elements	E (59)	CONTENT	LOW

 

Addres alot of these issues and you will decrease page times. also for it to take to long to load, its either loading something that is taking along time to render or you have a very poor configuration on the server itself.

 

Thanks,
Kyle