Needing server advice

[TitanJeff]

I run a football forum which is really struggling during games when I have 200 or so either viewing the same thread or in the chat room. Lots of server busy issues. I am on a dedicated server but really need to upgrade. Here is my current information via WHM:

Processor Info
Processor #1 Vendor: AuthenticAMD
Processor #1 Name: AMD Athlon(tm) Prosussor
Processor #1 speed: 1826.156 MHz
Processor #1 cache size: 512 KB

Memory Info
Memory: 1017052k/1032128k available (1892k kernel code, 14324k reserved, 768k data, 192k init, 114624k highmem)

System Info
Linux server.fuquadesign.com 2.6.9-67.ELsmp #1 SMP Fri Nov 16 12:48:03 EST 2007 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

PHP 5.2.11
MySQL Version 5.0.81-community

I turn off guests on game day. I actually shut down posting in the forum and only have the chat open. I even closed registration, shut off rss and anything else which I thought might increase server loads.

I still get up into loads of 10.00 with only 200 members in the forum. I've seen it as high as 21.00. It sometimes comes back down to 8.00 but rarely drops under 5.00.

I just don't understand the server issues and would like advice as to what I can do to help or suggestions as to what I should upgrade to.

[Angel-Wings]

Maybe enable mod_status temporary to see what your Apache is doing all the time - apachetop maybe help as well.
DB related - 5.1 of MySQL can do the same things a little bit better than 5.0 and run mysqltuner / tuning-primer to see if there're any bottlenecks.
With your 1 GB RAM - maybe there an upgrade might be a good choice - then setting the key_buffer of MySQL to 1/4 of the installed RAM and set the rest of the values to the ones mysqltuner / tuning-primer report.
And related to Apache - http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/misc/perf-tuning.html - gives some advices.
If you're on your own machine anyways there's no need to enable .htaccess since it all can be done directly in your httpd.conf.

Also other OS components might be busy - "netstat -tulpen" should report what connections are open and running lsof won't hurt as well.

[TitanJeff]

Thanks for the reply. I have no clue of what this means but I'll pass it along to the host.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

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