Load Averages: 31.22 26.70 26.49

**mitx** · 04-13-2008, 12:49 AM

I am running a GENESIS DEDICATED. My load averages look high. Site loads kind of slow. Maxclients set to 200 and is maxed out. Can anyone give me some helpful tips on how to reduce my load averages.

**jabbaonthedais** · 04-13-2008, 02:26 AM

There are so many things. I'm in the process of lowering my load at the moment also. There are really tons of things, but here are a few that have caused me high load in the past:

1. Catch-all being on. I had over 6k spam e-mail in my root e-mail I never knew where there. I have catch-all off by default, but for some reason some of my addon domains had it on.

2. Apache logs being full. There is a limit to how big the log files can get before it just can't write any more. I think the filesize limit is 2gb per file. This will cause a lot of load, and even crash your server if you get enough traffic.

3. Problematic scripts. If you have a weak formmail or contact script, spammers can use your server to send spam. A friend of mine had this happen and he was sending out thousands of e-mails a day. I've also been going through updating all my open-source scripts, like phpbb, mambo/joomla, wordpress. Sadly, you have to keep all those public scripts really up-to-date as exploits are abused.

I'm not a server guy, so I can't tell you settings to tweak, but most of the time when I have high load, its something stupid causing it, not really normal web traffic.