Traffic peaks.....

[stmadeveloper]

I've got an american idol related sites that kicks my servers tail ONLY after idol shows.

httpd fails due to the number of connection requests....

This is only something that happens for about 1 hour directly after a show ends, and I figure it costs me about 200 a month in revenue....

switching it to it's own dedicated server (it's shared with other low traffic level sites now) won't fix that issue - because it will still have to many connections....

What would you do?

The only thing I can think of is to mirror the site on another server and use a load balancer to deal with things.... but that's going to put me negative for the investment... so I'm up for ideas.

 

[m0rtal]

I think if you got your own server you'd be good. You can set the amount of connections httpd can have. So as long as it's a decent server you can crank it up a bit. I don't know the command off the top of my head but I'm sure someone can chime in or you can google it.

 

[JPJedi]

Do you have videos? I had a problem with streaming a video and that ate up all my bandwith on the server so I put the video on youtube and just linked the player from my site and all was fixed..

But it sounds like you just need some more bandwidth to handle all the request.

 

[m0rtal]

I found it: Apache Core Features

 

[stmadeveloper]

Thanks Mortal. I've got some time till the next season starts, figured it was time to get on it. Last year was a pain the ass with my WH server crashing 3 nights a week

Hopefully with the extra year in age we get a little more traffic as well to justify to the extra server.

The MaxClients directive sets the limit on the number of simultaneous requests that can be supported; not more than this number of child server processes will be created. To configure more than 256 clients, you must edit the HARD_SERVER_LIMIT entry in httpd.h and recompile.



Any suggestions on a good number to configure this too? What's the downfalls?

*I knew I had a bad answer from my servers support folks...lol *

 

[m0rtal]

Thanks Mortal. I've got some time till the next season starts, figured it was time to get on it. Last year was a pain the ass with my WH server crashing 3 nights a week

Hopefully with the extra year in age we get a little more traffic as well to justify to the extra server.

The MaxClients directive sets the limit on the number of simultaneous requests that can be supported; not more than this number of child server processes will be created. To configure more than 256 clients, you must edit the HARD_SERVER_LIMIT entry in httpd.h and recompile.



Any suggestions on a good number to configure this too? What's the downfalls?

*I knew I had a bad answer from my servers support folks...lol *

Not exactly sure, probably depends how many requests you get. You don't want the server to crash either
I don't know that much about tweaking servers so maybe someone more experienced can chime in as well. The normal setting is 150 I think and I remember when my proxy server was getting too many connections I think I turned it up to 256 and it helped a lot, but then it ended up crashing from time to time, heh.

Another thing you may want to do is make sure your stats software doesn't do it's updating during that time. Just go into statistics server configuration and change the processing times to low peak hours on your server.

 

[stmadeveloper]

Seocracy that's the part of deploying my rails apps I never 'quite' got. What I've done in the past is set up mongrel clustered using some type of software based load balancer between the apps.... but I'm just dealing with multiple file types and stuff there.... At least I think that's what is there. Time to go poking.....

My sys admin does all that crap so I never really learned. Just read up a bit and my head hurts

I'm going to shoot you an e-mail in the next day or so - need some databases scrapped anyway

 

[SeanW]

The MaxClients directive sets the limit on the number of simultaneous requests that can be supported; not more than this number of child server processes will be created. To configure more than 256 clients, you must edit the HARD_SERVER_LIMIT entry in httpd.h and recompile.

What version of Apache is that for? If you have to set MaxClients > 256 then also set ServerLimit to the same number, you'll be good.

Have a look at Tuning LAMP systems, Part 2: Optimizing Apache and PHP for some more Apache stuff.

All that said, if you're getting to 256 httpd processes then it's doubtful increasing it will fix the problem. Chances are your incoming request rate is higher than your request dispatch rate, so that number is going to grow until you hit MaxClients.

Look into some caching to improve your render time. If you're offering downloads, try a reverse proxy like squid or varnish in front of your apache process, they're much more efficient at spoon feeding slow clients.

Expose Web performance problems with the RRDtool offers some ways to measure and graph your server response which might also help.

Sean