Image Hot-Linking Bogging Down Server

[piper]

I need some suggestions.

I recently got a new Freedom plan VPS for a busy site. It caters to the MySpace crowd and I allow hot-linking. I had to temporarily disable hot-linking because my server kept dying. The stock setup could barely manage my site (Drupal CMS), so I tweaked MySQL and it runs fine now (-minus image linking).

Is there anything I can do to further tweak my VPS so that I can allow hot-linking again? Can a Freedom plan VPS even handle this? I get about 10 requests a second. I've read about lighttpd, but I can't get that working.

My Setup:
15,000 MB Disk Space
UNMETERED 2mbps Data Transfer
256 MB Guaranteed Ram
Equal share Dual Opteron CPU's
Host Machine w/ Dual CPU RAID10 Storage, 8 Gig RAM
Fully Burstable RAM and CPU
Virtuozzo Power Panel
InterWorx-CP v2.1.2
CentOS release 3.6 (Final)
Apache 2.0.54
PHP 4.3.11
MySQL 4.0.21-standard

[Ron]

It's probably the bandwidth requirement that is slowing you down. 10 requests per second is a lot if each request is for 100k-- that's looking for 10mbps. Even if each were only 20k, that's all of your bandwidth give or take.

Step one would be to compress the images further, and ensure that the server is properly issuing 304 headers in response to CONDITIONAL GETS (not modified since timestamp, or some such)

Step 3 would be to charge people for hosting the pics and upgrading to a faster connection. I think step two involves hara kiri...

[piper]

The average size image I have is 20K. I'm not an image host. I create images and allow hot-linking to them.

...and ensure that the server is properly issuing 304 headers in response to CONDITIONAL GETS (not modified since timestamp, or some such)

How do I do that?

...upgrading to a faster connection.

What would be sufficient?

[Ron]

I'm not a sysadmin, I don't know how to configure apache to allow for conditional gets. It might be the default for all I know.

I don't know if upgrading bandwidth would be enough, without looking at your stats very carefully. Even then, once you open up the bottleneck, others might appear elsewhere.

[Gwaihir]

Perhaps you could lure support into giving you 10 mbps for a day or two? After that test you'd know whether or not it is the problem, as well as how the rest of your VPS handles having to serve that.

[gerilya]

First thing you should do is to find a resource bottleneck (CPU, I/O, bandwidth or memory).

I completely agree with Ron, that it is most likely a bandwidth issue, but you have to know for sure.
Also, do you get 10 hotlinking requests per second, each 20K on average or it's 10 total requests/sec?

Can I see your site and example of images people hotlink to?

[piper]

I moved all images to another server. My site was running smoothly without them on the same server and now I have server problems. It seems the server I am on is experiencing difficulties. Today it died twice. Support has apologized and told me something about the rack that my server is on is having problems, I don't know what that means exactly, but I do know it means it's not my site this time but JagPC hardware.