Jason Dunn
12-21-2004, 05:45 PM
As regular Digital Media Thoughts readers are aware, the past six months have been rough on our server - it's been suffering stability problems from exceedingly high load (which happens when lots of people visit it). We've had daily phpBB "critical error" messages, and it's been common to have the site become unavailable one or more times a day. When we added an extra 2 GB of RAM two weeks ago, it helped out immensely - it gave us a bit of breathing room, but we're still having daily traffic spikes where our server groans under the load. That means if we get a high-traffic external link (Slashdot, Google News, etc.) our server will collapse again<!>.
Several weeks back we installed some code that allows us to look at every PHP script running on the server and to see which ones were using the most resources. We were surprised to learn that the #1 resource hog is the subscriber customization script - the one that allows subscribers to turn off advertising, customize the right-hand columns, and set the number of stories that appear on the home page. That last one is the most resource-intensive of all.
For the next 72 hours or so, we're going to deactivate 100% of the subscriber customization features and monitor what happens to our server load. Many of the dynamic components on our site are cached, so we're trying to reduce the number of remaining dynamic elements to figure out which ones we should keep and which ones we should drop.
I appreciate subscriber support immensely, but I hope you'll graciously put up with the "generic" site for a few days in order to give us time to complete our research. The end goal being, of course, a faster and more stable server for everyone, subscribers and non-subscribers alike.
Several weeks back we installed some code that allows us to look at every PHP script running on the server and to see which ones were using the most resources. We were surprised to learn that the #1 resource hog is the subscriber customization script - the one that allows subscribers to turn off advertising, customize the right-hand columns, and set the number of stories that appear on the home page. That last one is the most resource-intensive of all.
For the next 72 hours or so, we're going to deactivate 100% of the subscriber customization features and monitor what happens to our server load. Many of the dynamic components on our site are cached, so we're trying to reduce the number of remaining dynamic elements to figure out which ones we should keep and which ones we should drop.
I appreciate subscriber support immensely, but I hope you'll graciously put up with the "generic" site for a few days in order to give us time to complete our research. The end goal being, of course, a faster and more stable server for everyone, subscribers and non-subscribers alike.