jammin1911
Tue 18th May '04, 2:04am
Hello all - I host a decent sized vb (3.0.1 gold, all fixes/updates, etc) forum (50,000 ~15,000 members), but on a regular basis only about 40-50 active users. I'm hosting this all on a 1.7GHz Celeron w/ 1GB DDR, 7200RPM EIDE harddrive.
I'm wondering if these server specs are more than enough, barely enough, or not enough for this size of a forum?
If they ARE enough (which is what I suspect you guys will say) - Can anyone think of any reason that the server loads will (seemingly) randomly jump up from 0.5 average, up to 2, sometimes 4.xx loads and the load times become very slow? Sometimes it strarts swapping too, which should NOT be the case with 1GB of memory serving ONLY apache, mysql and the vb pages. Right? This is a FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE system with that linux-mysql patch installed. (excuse my improper lingo, I'm not the admin, obviously. hehe)
I've notice that usually the ram usage is because of all of the spawned httpd processes using ~60mb of memory each, and there is sometimes quite a few of them when the loads get high.
When the cpu usage is going crazy, its generally mysql using 60-80% cpu (while the rest of the cycles are going to the httpd processes) - the IDLE cpu is always 0.0% when this is happening.
What we've done as a temporary fix, because the only remedy for this "freak out" is to restart mysql, so every hour on the hour, we have mysql restarting automatically and it seems to keep everything at bay, but this is annoying because in the 4-5 seconds it takes to restart, we usually get 10-15 database error emails from VB, and it would also be nice to not have a jimmy rigged forum running, we'd much rather solve the problem.
Thanks in advance guys! Sorry for the long read.
I'm wondering if these server specs are more than enough, barely enough, or not enough for this size of a forum?
If they ARE enough (which is what I suspect you guys will say) - Can anyone think of any reason that the server loads will (seemingly) randomly jump up from 0.5 average, up to 2, sometimes 4.xx loads and the load times become very slow? Sometimes it strarts swapping too, which should NOT be the case with 1GB of memory serving ONLY apache, mysql and the vb pages. Right? This is a FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE system with that linux-mysql patch installed. (excuse my improper lingo, I'm not the admin, obviously. hehe)
I've notice that usually the ram usage is because of all of the spawned httpd processes using ~60mb of memory each, and there is sometimes quite a few of them when the loads get high.
When the cpu usage is going crazy, its generally mysql using 60-80% cpu (while the rest of the cycles are going to the httpd processes) - the IDLE cpu is always 0.0% when this is happening.
What we've done as a temporary fix, because the only remedy for this "freak out" is to restart mysql, so every hour on the hour, we have mysql restarting automatically and it seems to keep everything at bay, but this is annoying because in the 4-5 seconds it takes to restart, we usually get 10-15 database error emails from VB, and it would also be nice to not have a jimmy rigged forum running, we'd much rather solve the problem.
Thanks in advance guys! Sorry for the long read.