Hi all,
We have an external company managing our server:
Linux Kernel 2.4; MySql, 2 gigabytes of Ram.
We are running Drupal and have had our php.ini file configured to accept 800 max_connections.
However, we have found when we are getting many hits at the same time the server slows down and seems unable to handle it. I work for a radio program and when we promo "go to the website for blah", we get a lot of traffic. When I called support on this, I was told we have 400 apache processes running, and 322 myslq processes running. They recommended purchasing more ram. What do people think? Is that a lot of traffic? When I got the site there were 300 users online. That doesn't seem like a lot to me. Any recommendations would be helpful. Thanks in advance
Comments
Do you have caching turned
Do you have caching turned on? If not that'd be a good place to start. Are the 300 users online logged in or anon users?
Also, if you have a lot of blocks, check out the block cache module.
I'd also check out the devel module to get a better idea of what's using the majority of the resources.
We don't use the cache
We don't use the cache module because people complained that they were seeing yesterday's content. Also, we use many blocks in our site to highlight new content and drive people to those areas. I'll ceck out the devel module though, thanks.
The 300 users are anynomous
The cache should clear when
The cache should clear when content is updated to prevent old content from showing, try setting the minimum cache lifetime to "none" if it's not already. Same for the Block Cache module...you can set it so blocks that are more time sensitive will update more often, or every time the content in them changes.
The other option is to manually clear the cache every so often, since you're in a position where you have some warning when large levels of traffic are going to come in, you could clear the cache during your slow times.
As the site grows, making use of the cache becomes more an more of a necessity. On my own site, the server crumbled under 1000 users with caching off, but held up to over 30,000 users with caching on.
interesting... let me give
interesting... let me give it a try thank you for your time and I will post to let you know what happens!