Recommend a Good Server Optimizer?

[George]

I'm looking for someone or a company to look at my server set up and make changes or recommendations to increase effciency.

I am growing out of servers at a rate of one new server every 2 months! So my host must be setting them up pretty crapily.

Example my max mysql connections is set to only 100

my host says it's to keep the server/memory load down but there's gotta be a way to tweak mysql to make it more efficient.

I'd ask my partner on another site I co-own (he does all our server stuff for that site) but he's on vacation for 2 weeks and I dont wanna bother him.

[rob]

Is there anything actually wrong with your server right now (i.e: slow load time)?

If you don't need Apache-specific features you can always swap it for a lightweight web server such as lighttpd which would reduce your overall server load.. other than that I'd look into optimizing Apache (timeout, keepalive, min/maxspareservers, etc)..

[George]

OK thanks I'll reasearch those.


Well the problem is 2 fold.

1) During peak hours... i.e. right now.... the server load/memory used jumps into the red. like 86 to 90% and the response time gets slower. Rarely a timeout but it does take several sections for the page to even begin loading.

2) Also around peak times I start getting mysql too many connections errors due to the 100 connections max limit.

So with mysql eating so much memory (and I imagine apache too) it seems I can't increase the mysql max connections until I figure out how to make the server more efficient.

[SlickEddie]

Also, non-optimized mysql queries can be problematic as well.

[minnseoelite]

make sure any mysql connections that your site's script(s) open are automatically closed by the script instead of letting them stay open

[George]

yeah mysql_close();

I've been checking for that today. So far so good. One server hosts a vbulleitn forum so I'm "hoping" vb was smart enough to build that into the code?

[minnseoelite]

I have no clue about the inner workings of VB.....I have always used PHPbb

[wce]

mysql connections is probably the easiest thing in the world to fix... pico /etc/my.cnf, change, or add if needed, max_connections = 256 (or whatever you want), restart mysql and you're done

[donwilson]

PHP closes mysql connections at the end of each page load.

Using mysql_close() isn't usually necessary, as non-persistent open links are automatically closed at the end of the script's execution.
See: php.net - mysql_close() (http://us2.php.net/mysql_close)

[magnet]

PHP closes mysql connections at the end of each page load.


See: php.net - mysql_close() (http://us2.php.net/mysql_close)
exactly


you might want to look into memcache (www.danga.com/memcached/) - it reduced the mysql load with more than 50% on my servers. really good if you don't mind doing some small edits in your php script

[Ajay]

I installed Alternative PHP cache (APC) on my server and it seemed to give it a performance boost. I'm with steadfast and pay 50.00 extra for gold admin, and they do a lot of optimization for free. Probably a cheaper solution out there, but I'm comfortable with them.

[magnet]

I installed Alternative PHP cache (APC) on my server and it seemed to give it a performance boost. I'm with steadfast and pay 50.00 extra for gold admin, and they do a lot of optimization for free. Probably a cheaper solution out there, but I'm comfortable with them.

yeah I have APC as well, didn't really notice a big difference
You can also look into mod_expires, an apache module which adds an expire tag to your images. that way the browser will cache it more quickly/longer.

[donwilson]

I'm going to delve into the Smarty template system since it seems to do caching fairly well. If that doesn't work, then memcached will be the last resort, but looks like the most work.