Advice requested: Server optermisation

[Chris.B]

Hi from the uk, been with jag about 2 months and with the normal hiccups im prity pleased overal both with the service and the rate at which im picking up server admin skills.

I have run into one or two snags thoe mainly: server load, at the minute we have one main account uterlising a vps with 768 ram burstable to 2gb, running on it is the normal hosting services web ftp mail etc, but its just runnign like a snail when people start to uterlise mailman (mailmain?) the system has been checked over for security by jag and by another companey but it has been hinted that the apache and mysql services need optermising for vps ussage.

Would anyone be as willing to throw me a bone? ive ben googling for best part of 2 days so im not one to start running to mummy as soon as something breaks i do like trying to sort it myself.

Any hints on how to reduce the load (other than rm -fr please) would be really appreciated

On another note does anyone know of a way to have a webmail cleint running that can bypass strict firewalls that disallow anything other than port 80

Regards, Christopher Berry

[thisisit3]

hmm nobody can tell you for sure, it all depends on the kind of software (website) that you are running.

for example, i once took 4 days to optimize the database of one of my clients and the result was 30% faster site that used about 15% less memory. I had to optimize most SQL queries by hand and altered most database tables to add Indexes, Foreign Keys and other types of relationships (which means converting the tables to InnoDB).

For Apache, usually the problem is the application that apache runs, since apache itself doesn't do much else other than to serve pages, so i don't think you can do much. Maybe play with the processes/threads/htaccess/etc but not much else.

[Chris.B]

To be honest it seems that its the mailman cpanel script thats the nightmare here i seem to have got the load down to agreeble levels and now able to access my small php (e107) script fine so mysql isnt being uterlised that much just needs to be a overall server optermisation tbh, im woundering if a upgrade to 1gb ram would help or not.....

[thisisit3]

some heavy sites with lots of images and cool stuff like on-the-fly PDF generators and lots of stuff like that, with several thousands of users per day, use only 100mb of memory.

you are not solving the problem by buying more memory.

personally, i've disabled mailman because i found it to be a big pile of junk of unoptimized code that run too slow and ate too much memory.

[Chris.B]

this one account while may only be one is a heavy mail user (recruitment agency so all legit/inter office comms) uterlising mailman ive been looking into alternatives to it and once i find one i hope to disable mailman all togther

[thisisit3]

You should monitor all processes for cpu and memory usage, to figure out exactly what is using your resources.

[Frank Broughton]

I also disabled mailman on my VPS. PHPList works great for mail lists. http://www.phplist.com/

[Frank Broughton]

You should monitor all processes for cpu and memory usage, to figure out exactly what is using your resources.

of which Spam Assassin is a huge memory hog, you may need to reduce the number of child processes running. Also clam av can slow a site down.

[Ron]

Someone also posted here that running php-cgi as opposed to as an Apache mod was much better for memory utilization.