Server ok? Optimization needed?

[Alex_]

Hi,

I searched a while in the forums but I would be glad if someone could help me here a bit.

I wouldn't call our forum a bigboard yet...
Some stats:
- about 3000 members (after deleting over 2000 inactives)
- over 450.000 posts
- about 250 logged in users per day (and a lot lot more guests - we have many people reading without writing in the forums)
- about 100-120 new posts a day

When I look at other forums these are very moderate numbers but as I was checking the webstats I saw that we had doubled our visits, hits and traffic over the last two months.

We now have an average of 2.3 gb traffic a day increasing which makes about 240 mb per visitor per month.

As I do not have any comparisons to these numbers I would be happy if someone could tell me if we are still at the low end ;)

The board is now on a dual xeon 2.4ghz machine with 1 gb of ram and unfortunatly only an ordenary ide hdd.

I had to tweak our apache and mysql (caching etc) - I installed plugin accelerator and template compressor - the forums are very fast even when the server load are higher than I wanted them to be (with vB 3.5.x they doubled...)

Some fancy curves can be seen here
http://mrtg.3dchips.net/

Is there anything we _have_ to improve in our setup? Will we get into trouble when the numbers still increase?

[Erwin]

What are the loads?

[Alex_]

You can see them on my mrtg page - it's the 'Load Averages' ;)
The unit is load * 100 (the script seems not to be able to handle floats)

[MrLister]

You're fine. You max load is 1? You have nothing to worry about for a LONG time

[TopKing]

hello sir
what abut me :)

i have load average: 10.20 up to 70.10 some times and the server stop

i have
Threads: 55,905, Posts: 903,526, Members: 24,633

Currently Active Users: 1011
up to 2000 up to 2500 so its so mush

i hear abut huck who can help me
any good help pls ?

[MrLister]

TopKing: you're defiently going ot have to do something about that. Did you ever config your httpd.conf or my.cnf?

[Alex_]

You're fine. You max load is 1? You have nothing to worry about for a LONG time
It was 4 ;)
But ok I know that's not much...

The cpu load (not avg load) has more than doubled with the update to 3.5 and the forum lagged quite a lot... with plugin accelerator (and some sql tweaks) it's fast as before but the cpu load is still 25-50% while it was 0-10% before.

I never thought that our system could be fully streched with only our not-so-big forum but with 3.5 I think a dual xeon is minimum :)

[MrLister]

Do you have any sort of PHP cache installed such as mmcache or apc? Also my.cnf? MySQL cache enabled?

[Alex_]

mysql is optimized using a collection of tipps from several vB forums (com org etc ;)) - the standard setup without caching did a good job before 3.5 so I was simply too lazy to do this earlier...

We do not have any acceleration addons yet however I want to take a look at the template cache plugin when it's ready to store them in the memory and not on the hdd.

Perhaps I should also take a loop at php caching or precompiled php...

Since we have only one gig of ram and the mrtg shows that it's always full while the system is swapping things out - should we first upgrade ram?

[MrLister]

Defiently upgrade the ram. Swap will crash your server and cause higher server loads fasters then anything else. (1GB should do it but it's using 100% of your swap meaning you don't really know how much you need. you can type in "free -m" and see how much memory is in cache because what's swapped could easily just be the stuff that's not used that's waiting to expire)

Also install http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=165367 . The memory would probably run you a extra $25 / month, APC above will cost you nothing except 3 minutes of your time and the difference should be day and night.

mysql is optimized using a collection of tipps from several vB forums (com org etc ;)) - the standard setup without caching did a good job before 3.5 so I was simply too lazy to do this earlier...

We do not have any acceleration addons yet however I want to take a look at the template cache plugin when it's ready to store them in the memory and not on the hdd.

Perhaps I should also take a loop at php caching or precompiled php...

Since we have only one gig of ram and the mrtg shows that it's always full while the system is swapping things out - should we first upgrade ram?

[Alex_]

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 883 820 63 0 0 428
-/+ buffers/cache: 390 493
Swap: 980 161 818

I'll try out APC.

(Perhaps I can convince the server owner to splash out one more gb of ram :))

[MrLister]

Oh you don't auctually need any more ram.

You have 1GB ram total, 500MB of it is in cache and your swap is only used for non active files. Your server traffic/load will have to double before you require any more ram.

If you're finding your forum to be lagging, make sure that whoever you're hosting with has a good backbone network because you can have the best server in the world but if you're connected through a clogged line it's gonna go slow. If it's not the network that's the problem, check the CPU. If it is the CPU then APC will fix that. If it's not the CPU it could be your iowait (hard drive) at which point you can disable logging or put logging and mysql on another server or get a RAID setup (i recommend raid 10)

[Alex_]

Hmm... apc is running - now my cpu load has gone from 25-50 to down to < 25 but the load avg peaks went from 0.5 up to 1.0+ with the highest of 5.2!

http://mrtg.3dchips.net/

So what's better... lower load avg peaks or lower continuous cpu load?