Server ok? Optimization needed?

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?

[Alex_]

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