Moving up in the *server* world...

[incka]

I've had a normal server for almost a year now, but my sites are getting slow...

What should I do, my options are:

Upgrade to 20mbps server. Probably cheaper.
Buy a new server and do the load balancing thing between them.

Whatever happens, I'm getting my server from http://www.servermatrix.com to save hassle.

[Xander]

What is your current server? Do you know what the problem is? Its it cpu, memory, mysql, bandwidth or something else that is not coping? There could be a lot of reasons, if its simply bandwidth upgrading your pipe is the answer but if its not enough mem or drive space it would make no difference.

[Westech]

You need to figure out what's causing the bottleneck and slowing down your sites. You may be able to avoid the expense of a new server.

For instance: If it's too much memory usage but your cpu usage is ok, you could probably get by with a memory upgrade. If you have a 10 mbps port and you're maxing it out but your server load is still relatively low, you might be able to get by with upgrading to a 100 mbps port. Do you have any idea of what's causing the bottleneck?

[Westech]

Xander, I guess great minds think alike! :)

[incka]

Server Load 1.13 (1 cpu) RED LIGHT
Memory Used 42.3 % GREEN LIGHT

[incka]

2.40GHz is my processor speed. It's a celeron.

[Westech]

Sounds like you either need to do some optimization or get a faster server. What does the "top" command show you for cpu usage during times when your server's running slowly?

[MarkB]

If you're hosting a number of MySQL-based sites, I'd jump to a Pentium machine just for a little more oomph. But make sure, either way, your apache, php and mysql are optimised.

[moonshield]

get some super-cluster or something... At the minimum use an OS like RHEL, if you are not already.

[s2kinteg916]

i dislike the 20mbs server.... the network is slow at times... pretty frustrating..

[AndyH]

20mb/s will help you zero.

Move up to a Dual Xeon and work on optimizing things. If you have the CPU power to give then turn on mod_gzip, your PHP pages will load faster.

[Xander]

Yeah defintely sounds like a CPU upgrade(atleast a pentium or dual celeron).

[incka]

What is the difference between a pentium and a celeron of the same speed apart from price?

[r2d2]

Pentium has more on-chip cache for a start (1Mb instead of 256Kb?). Means it spends less time waiting to access memory when it can get data from cache. I wouldnt think a celeron would make a good server? Chips designed for server use tend to have even more cache than a standard pentium dont they? So cache is probably important in a server application...

[Westech]

To translate what r2 said, basically if you have a Pentium 4 and a Celeron of the same speed the Pentium will be faster. :)

[incka]

How much faster? Celeron = 100, what would a pentium 4=?

[moonshield]

Celeron = 100 Pentium 4 = 150 Xeon = 200... Not precise, but a Xeon would be the best possible processor. Cacheing is extremely helpful in database processing. The Celeron has barely any cache and the Xeon is quite loaded.

[r2d2]

Well kind of, depends what your doing with it. A ferrari would beat a jeep hands down on the road, but change to a bit of offroad and the ferrari would be useless.

In this case though, a Pentium will always be better than a celeron, but the amount would depend on the usage.

Imagine if you will the celeron has normal car wheels, the pentium has 4x4 wheels, and the Xeon has monster truck wheels, which would you want to drive round a boggy bit of offroad track?

[moonshield]

you can't tell me that you would rather have a celeron then a Xeon can you? That would be crazy talk. The Xeon is THE server processor from Intel.

[r2d2]

Oh no, not at all! Was just trying to illustrate the point that the difference between two items depends very much on what you want to do with them.

If you just wanted a word processor as cheap as possible, a celeron would be best. But for a server, using a celeron is like pulling up to the Formula 1 starting line in your 1400cc Ford Escort... Its gonna get trounced.

[moonshield]

oh okay. That makes sense, but if I were to upgrade a server I would go Xeon. Right now I have basically the same thing as Sean, a 2.4 GHz Celeron and it is fine for my purposes. Eventually though I will probably upgrade to a dual Xeon beast.

[incka]

Only DUAL-Xeon avail. Expensive. http://www.servermatrix.com

[r2d2]

Dual-Xeon will be a great improvement for less than double the price ($170 over $100 now?). How much is it costing you having a slow server?

[incka]

I'm not sure, I added loads of extras like 60ips and CPanel...

Do you think I should just swtich to a dual xeon, or should I keep the one I have now and use cluster technology?

[AndyH]

60 ips ???

Cpanel would not slow your server much, if at all.

You wouldn't know how to use cluster technology (no offense intended) and a Dual Xeon would most probably be more than enough.

[r2d2]

Cluster technology would seem to be a bit OTT, and against the KISS principle... Its not like you have one huge site that cant be served by one server and hence need clustering, you have lots of smaller ones, and doing what Chris does(when you need to) would be a better idea, i.e. multiple sites spread out over multiple servers.

You could even keep your existing server, get another one somewhere else (with different Class C IP), then spread your sites out so that you can interlink them across completely different IP ranges.

[incka]

The problem is it's one site taking up all the resources, but I think Dual Xeon should be ok for now... In 4 months I'm sure I will need to do a cluster.

[AndyH]

What does the one site do?

I'm pretty sure in 4 months you won't *need* to cluster.

[MarkB]

Yes, I'd be interested in hearing what this site is, and WHY it's using up a lot of resources.

[moonshield]

need a cluster? must be an awesome site.

[incka]

URGames.com - Over 25,000 visits a day. High page views per visit. Heavy PHP/MySQL. Average visit take up about 1mb of bandwidth at least.

[MarkB]

You may want to look into caching your page output (if you don't already) to cut down on database calls.

[incka]

My friend does this with his cheats site... Perhaps this is a good idea...

[r2d2]

URGames.com - Over 25,000 visits a day. High page views per visit. Heavy PHP/MySQL. Average visit take up about 1mb of bandwidth at least.

Nice :) Dont know a huge amount about what a general server could handle, but Im not surprised a celeron is struggling with that :)

So thats about 25Gb a day? At the moment that would take me about 5 years :)

[moonshield]

that looks like it is going to be awesome. 25k right now? or is that a planned number?

[Xander]

I've not dealt with secondary servers purely for databases but wouldn't that help if its high cpu due to mysql?

[AndyH]

Get a Dual Xeon and see how it goes. I could be pretty much certain that will be enough...it will be a large enough jump from what you have also.

[incka]

I've got higher than 25k several times this week. It's not a planned number, it's about a week average number.

Yep, Dual Xeon seems to be the way to go. Will I need a dedicated line or will a shared one do?

[AndyH]

I've got higher than 25k several times this week. It's not a planned number, it's about a week average number.

Yep, Dual Xeon seems to be the way to go. Will I need a dedicated line or will a shared one do?

Can you post your bandwidth usage?

Cpanel -> Webstats -> Bandwidth

Dedicated line or shared: ummmm, with all server leasing it is the same ... many OCxx lines shared between all clients.

[incka]

Infact, I don't think I'm gonna need a dedicated line...

[Chris]

My literature site server does over 200,000 impressions a day, most of which use MySQL, and it runs on a P4 3.06 w/HT.

[Xander]

My literature site server does over 200,000 impressions a day, most of which use MySQL, and it runs on a P4 3.06 w/HT.

Do you have any/many other active sites on the server?

Either way I guess its best for uptime reasons alone two have sep servers for upgrades/etc?

[Chris]

A few other sites. 3 right now (total), soon to be 4.

[incka]

The new one is the poetry one?

[MarkB]

You know, perhaps Chris doesn't want his new sites mentioned until HE mentions them? ;) Just common courtesy.

(If he HAS mentioned it, then I apologise)

[incka]

He's mentioned it on another forum that I visit regularly which is open to the public...

I don't mind if you reveal my sites that I haven't revealed yet, I've got plenty of them that are in public beta...

[Chris]

No, actually. I was counting that as one of the three.

I'm just moving one of my sites from a different server onto there is all. Part of my process of getting sites off my oldest server.

[AndyH]

I do about 400,000+ page views daily on one of my sites which is on a P4 2.4Ghz ... it is soon being upgraded to Frontend (P4) <-> Database (Dual Xeon), however if it can do that much with atleast 6 mySQL queries perpage load (many loads mre) then i'm sure a Dual Xeon will do.

Also, you do not need a dedicated line, that would be worse in some ways.