How much traffic do you get?

The site went down briefly. i contacted the host and they said it maxed out and they had to reboot the server

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This i am not sure but its usually between 250 and 300 people online all day. i dont know if more came on at the time it went down

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Just installed vboptomize. now trying to set up xcache. struggling a bit but hopefully that will help once thats done

Do you have root access on your server? If you do then you can reset it yourself.

Also you can use this to help lazy load your pages. Might wind up saving you a ton of resources if your site is image heavy.
lazy load, load your page faster & save bandwidth

Just trying to set up xcache but no one seems to know how. im struggling

Look at your server logs and see when the resource usage is high. it is often a cause of a database back up or some other major cron task that causes these issues.

Also, there are a number of settings you can change to lower resource usage..

Turn off the thread check for subscriptions, who read a thread.. make sure you keep add no cache headers off, Turn off whos online, spider identification...make sure you have the whos online feature set to random and not alphabetical. Basically just go through all of your setttings and see where you can reduce. Similiar threads is also a big hit.

Make sure people have to wait maybe 30 seconds between searches or posts..

There are many things you can do. Go through your mods as well to see if you can save any recourse.

Lazy load may make your pages load faster but it is not going to lessen the server load much if anything at all.

1 gig of ram isn't much really these days but your site should run at least under normal usage. My server has 16 gigs and I still get slow downs occasionally when under heavy load like someone doing amass mail while a full server back up is running.

Hope this helps

Don't worry @DreadsUK, you are on the right track with your learning curve. Everything was great at 50 simultaneous users, then you grew to 250, now things start to look and feel differently. Most of us have been there. Okay, okay, there are a few of you out there that are gifted -- you can smile now, while I get the pie ready. :)