By break9 on

I have a site that I built using drupal6. the site is hosted on a VPS with 384mb ram. the problem is our site has gotten busy and our sever overloads every nine or so hours forcing me to have to restart the server.

I am not using the VPS for anything except to run the website the site DB and email are all on separate servers (apache server). So do I need to spend a bunch of money and have my site "optimized" or do I need to spend a bunch of money and beef up my "ram"?

Current Alexa is 150K.

Regardless of the answer does anyone have a recommendation of who to ask or call about this. I have been all over the web looking for drupal performance guru's but haven't had much luck.

Any help is appreciated.

Trevor

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

-Anti-’s picture

-Anti- commented

Subscribing.

> Current Alexa is 150K

I know what Alexa is (heard of it, at least). What does 150k mean exactly?
150,000 unique hits per month? How many regular registered users do you have?

I'm going to try to run a school site on a 384mb ram VPS.
I'm expecting 5000 unique guest hits a month.

Additionally, the community will have 650 very regular users. I expect 20,000 logins per month
if the site is successfully utilised by the students, with a max of about 40 simultaneous logins.

Mostly the content will be text and images, but 50% of nodes will also have attached documents.
2% or less of the site will be streamed video/audio, although I'm hoping that the 'video upload'
module will work properly, meaning that youtube will bear the brunt of that kind of resource usage.
I've also got the server handling 30 light-usage email accounts.

Break9, maybe you are in a position to give me your opinion on whether a VPS will handle this?
It sounds like your site is much busier than mine will be? At what point did your server start crashing?

break9’s picture

break9 commented

Unfortunately I have know idea how many user the site should be able to handle based on our current configuration and traffic. Your "Alexa Rank" is, based on my understanding, how popular(visited) your site is compared to every other site out there. For example, Google is #1. Alexa is flawed and I could really care less about what my rank is but I noticed that when we dropped under 175K we started having some issues and at 150K I have to restart the vps 3 times a day. SUCKS!!!!!

This is exactly my question as well. What is normal for 283mb of ram and can anyone recommend a person or company to tell me which direction to go, Ram, or site optimization?

Thanks.

good luck with the school site.