By designbump on

I created/run DesignBump.com - the site has grown increasingly sluggish in the last few days and as of right now is down. I am not aware of any changes that should have brought this on. Traffic has remained steady at about 6-12 thousand pageviews a day. I have a dedicated virtual with over 3 gb of ram. I am not too up to speed in the database optimization process but the plesk panel says that every last bit of memory is being used up (this was the case even when I took the site offline).

If this is your area of expertise I could really use your input and help. Just contact me and we can talk about fees and the like.

Thanks.

Best,

John

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

design10’s picture

design10 commented

Might not be drupal at all.

Mike Dodd’s picture

Mike Dodd commented

Could be 100's of things and would be quite hard to diagnose but at a guess heres a few things it could be:

- thats a lot of hits if your pages have a lot of rich content (high res images, flash files videos etc) then it may just not be able to cope witht the load
- servers geographic location
- database server and the webserver on same machine?
- DOS attacks agianst the site (intentially and unintentionally)
- Have you got the boost module on?
- try caching and gziping your pages
- reduce the number of elements the site has to load e.g. sprite sheets signle javascript file.
- Reduce the number of external files it loads
- try serving content from flickr and youtube to reduce your websites bandwidth
- do you have a lot of stats and tracking code on there as this will slow it down.
- are you loading in APIs for pages that don't need it?
These are a few of the big things. If these are all fine then look at your server setup, libraries & versions php.ini settings etc and if you are happy with all of these then thnk about making your code more efficiant. For instnace calling SELECT * where you don not need all the elements will reduce the speed of the query. (only slighlty but its still a difference)

After this have a look cleaning out your DB removing old cached data, search results etc but to be honest Drupal is pretty good at this anyway.

Then try additional modules like image cache to reduce the image load times and try compressing moves more.

After this look at upgrading your server

after all of that have beer then get someone else to have a look through as they may find some things you missed but this should do you ok.

I personally don't like Virtual servers so would suggest moving to a dedcated machine and again this may help.

Any way hopethis helps, any questions just drop me a message.

Best Regards

Mike D

If Windows is the answer, it must have been a stupid question. -- Filip Van Raemdonck

design10’s picture

design10 commented

you got 50$-150$ a month extra

You must be doing well
=)

Mike Dodd’s picture

Mike Dodd commented

lol I have a couple of dozen dedicated servers both in the EU and the US for various clients but most of these servers cost me over $1000 a month but these are top servers with excellent backup systems, supprot etc and when dealing with some of my larger sites there is no other option to deal with the quantity of traffic they recieve. Besides the clients pay for it not me, if they want a $5 doller a month boxx thats what they get. They want the best, then they pay more lol simples :p.

If Windows is the answer, it must have been a stupid question. -- Filip Van Raemdonck

bpirkle’s picture

bpirkle commented

Howdy,

I see your site is back up now, congrats. Hopefully you identified the problem.

There are a few things that are good practice to do regarding database usage, whether or not they are/were the cause of your immediate problem.

Are you using page caching?
Are you using block caching (particularly if you are using blocks generated by Views)?
Are you using Block Cache Alter to make block caching work to its best advantage?
Are you using the Image module extensively (we've seen some image/file/db issues on Drupal 6, and there are some workarounds)

Bill P.