Thread: system loads and why

Not linux, sorry. FreeBSD?

Originally Posted by Rob101

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My advice is, IMHO. HEAPS of stuff, in no particular order.

depending where/what your bottlenecks are. I'm assuming you want to bring the volume of traffic down.

You seem to be running apache on Linux (or at least your hosting provider, voice valley is, depending on your set-up).

welcome to the honey pot, all is not as it seems :P

Originally Posted by Rob101

Install mod_gzip or mod_deflate, that will bring your text serving size down HEAPS for surprisingly little processing overhead. If you find you're losing too many CPU cycles, i'd suggest tuning the level of compression so that the response time is good but you also get reasonable compression.

long since done

Originally Posted by Rob101

grep your apache logs into a mysql table. Do a 'group by' query and accumulate the number of hits per URI multiplied by the byte size of the responses.
You'll find that the data is skewed to a few objects, which will probably be binary photographs. unlink the photographs.


depending on the distribution of bytes / response objects, a reverse proxy might also help serve common, static objects.

Check that your conditional requests are actually working. If clients are sending IMS requests and your server is sending back objects when it should be a positive cache acknowledgment.

If processing is your bottleneck, depending on the level of access you have to the machine i'd probably install zend optimizer, it is apparently compatible with suhosin.

zend and apc. found xcache problematic

Originally Posted by Rob101

If the DB is your bottleneck, you might need to look towards replication - which is probably too expensive.

agreed

Originally Posted by Rob101

The main page http://www.aulro.com/ is FAR too large, 119.7k. Pull the CSS out into a separate file, each time someone loads the main page, they keep downloading the static CSS, it should be seperate and locally cached. Most/all of the javascript should also be placed in seperate objects.
I'd pull all the whitespace from it too. It's just wasted.

will look into that,..

Originally Posted by Rob101

think about removing dynamic content, like the time, from pages that are not otherwise changed. This will allow the content to be cached.

hmmmmmmmm yes and no... will be looking into some of the dynamics of the way it is setup.
...

Originally Posted by Rob101

are you serving any content other than this forum?
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dedicated p4 box with 4gig of ram running freebsd with raided sata hdd's

it is running an openads adserver for the system as well but that will be leaving shortly.

and postfix for mail

Oh yes.
and I should say.
Spectacular forum.

I understood nothing of the above except this :

Originally Posted by Rob101

Oh yes.
and I should say.
Spectacular forum.

Understatement of the year IMO

Thinking of ways you can reduce the number of disk accesses.

You using RAID to increase volume or for data replication/disk duplication? If the former, this can add significantly to your read/write times. With the cost of large disks being so low now it may be wise to consider copying everything onto a larger disk, e.g. 500Gb <$200, 1Tb still expensive but will come down soon.

You might need to look at how big you have set the partitions (?). Can you move the swap disk to another drive (that'd be at least 4Gb on its own)?

What about storing BLOBS on another drive?

is a mirror for backup

i will be upgrading the drives to some of the new 32mb cache gear this year some time.

Originally Posted by incisor

will look into that,..

Sorry, I think that I got the size of the page wrong by looking at the xfer rate in wget, rather than the object size. But the point still holds water.
um, yeah. and now to stfu.

Originally Posted by incisor

is a mirror for backup

Right, that shouldn't make too much difference, but with a large number of requests it could end up as a bottle neck as the disks sync with each other.

Originally Posted by incisor

i will be upgrading the drives to some of the new 32mb cache gear this year some time.

You will probably notice a difference for a while. What are your storage requirements and will they increase by much?

The requirement to store images outside the forum may be a necessary step although having the images as a library resource may have historical value in years to come.