Creativebits down and up again
Ivan | Tue, 2006-01-10 23:40I'm sure you've noticed that cb was down. I'm not quite sure what is happening. We already had the dedicated server. Specs: Pentium IV (non Celeron!), 30 GB usable IDE storage, 60 GB IDE backup drive, 4 TB bandwidth per month.
We've been running creativebits.org and adsoftheworld.com on this Debian Linux machine. The combined traffic is about 30K page loads using up 3GB bandwidth per day. We had 512MB RAM on the server and Dreamhost claimed that it wasn't enough to run the sites. Apparently the server was using all the 512MB RAM plus another 1.5GB of virtual RAM. They recommended to upgrade the memory to 2GB. I told them to go ahead, and now we have our site back.
kbahey our respected Drupal programmer and server guru tells me that the videos served through Ads of the World are causing the high memory usage and they don't play well with the PHP/MySQL setup, so for now I disabled AotW to see what happens.
It's not easy to manage a high traffic web site I tell you! If you have any suggestions or ideas please do share!
Commenting on this Blog entry is closed.
I really missed CB, had some InDesign related questions (all solved now though). I don't know if this possible but maybe you can limit the amount of RAM that's used per website.
Anyway, good to have the site back.. let's get the new Apple Things Posts rolling :D.
PS
Why disable AotW completly? At least you can show a notice with the reason of the site beeing offline.
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Ivan
I cannot say for sure if that is the reason or not, since I did not see the problem as it happened. I was listing out possibilities of where the problems may be.
Any given server has a finite amount of CPU, memory, disk space, and bandwidth.
Different loads have different demands and bottlenecks.
In general, serving videos and images is a very different load from serving dynamic content from a database. It is best to separate that load on two servers (or more).
For Drupal, caching products may help, such as Turck MMCache or EAccelerator. Page caches also helps, such as Squid Cache. Check this page on Drupal performance tuning.
Check if your RSS feeds are eating up too much resources by being downloaded too frequently. Put a crawl delay in robots.txt.
For images and video, a second server can be the best option. At some point, it may be a good idea if you subscribe to a geographical bandwidth service such as Akamai ( don't think you need that yet though).
And yes, I agree that managing a high traffic site is far from easy.
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Drupal development and customization: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com
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Drupal development and customization: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com
Hi
I checked Drupal's logs, and there seem to be too many requests for feeds.
Perhaps moving feeds to a service like Feed Burner and writing an htaccess redirect to it is best.
A similar problem for a Mac site, is that someone wrote a widget to refresh every 30 seconds, thus hammering the site with request.
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Drupal development and customization: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com
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Drupal development and customization: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com
I subscribe to about 90 different feeds with Desktop Sidebar and just about the only ones I have problems keeping correctly up-to-date are the Feedburner ones - it doesn't have post dates so you can't tell what was posted when, making it difficult for software to keep track of what's what.
Better off using a caching mechanism for the feed itself, maybe generating the feed file from a script and having it just a static file?
Damien