*** Calling on all Server Guru's for advise please ***

[royalmice]

I need some advise for upgrading my server:

98% of my server is used for wordpress blog. I have about 150 WP Autoblog which i maintain with wp robot. the other 2% is just some static sites.

I use the 150 raptor drive exclusive for MYSQL and one of the 2 500 gb's i use exclusive for back up.

I dont really have any problems with the server just sometimes it hangs because to many http connections.

I am now in a upgrade mood but not really sure what to get.
Below is my current hardware config, what would you upgrade if you were me



1 Intel Xeon Quad-Core X3440 2.533GHz 2.5 GT/s 1156pin 8MB CPU
4 Kingston 4GB DDR3 1333 ECC/REG Memory
2 Seagate 500 GB
1 Supermicro X8SIL Motherboard
1 Supermicro P0046P Heatsink
1 Supermicro 813MTQ-350CB Chassis
1x Western Digital VelociRaptor WD1500HLFS 150GB SATA2 10k rpm 16MB Hard Drive
1000 mbit port


Please only post if you know what you are talking about and can contribute

Thanks guys

 

[en.smartis]

Just one c:/ drive? I mean just one physical drive? Please raid them.

 

[matsta]

I'm hoping that your running linux and not windows with a apache app.

So really the main problem is going to be your hard drive and ram.

First I would upgrade the ram to 8gb. This should stop stuff from hanging.

Now since you are running a bunch of crons, its going to be putting massive loads on your server every X amount of minutes. So I would get someone to scatter the cron jobs every few minutes or so and your load should decrease significantly.

Now what I would do is upgrade to some ssd's.

These intel's are on special for $100 each. Only 40gb but a couple should do the trick. Get a decent raid card off newegg and chuck them in raid 0. Then setup rsync to backup the drives every x amounts of hours. I would then use the 500gb as a storage drive and the raptor as the boot drive and the ssd's for the sql stuff.

Should be around $500-600 to upgrade. The CPU should be fine, it won't be taxed really, ram and drive speeds are 999x more important!

 

[royalmice]

Just one c:/ drive? I mean just one physical drive? Please raid them.

Thats the current disk status

Device Size Used Available Percent Used Mount Point
/dev/sda1 99M 32M 62M 35% /boot
/dev/sda2 450G 66G 361G 16% /
/dev/sdb1 452G 60G 369G 14% /bak
/dev/sdc1 136G 1.5G 127G 2% /mysql
/usr/tmpDSK 1.5G 43M 1.4G 4% /tmp

 

[royalmice]

I'm hoping that your running linux and not windows with a apache app.

So really the main problem is going to be your hard drive and ram.

First I would upgrade the ram to 8gb. This should stop stuff from hanging.

Now since you are running a bunch of crons, its going to be putting massive loads on your server every X amount of minutes. So I would get someone to scatter the cron jobs every few minutes or so and your load should decrease significantly.

Now what I would do is upgrade to some ssd's.

These intel's are on special for $100 each. Only 40gb but a couple should do the trick. Get a decent raid card off newegg and chuck them in raid 0. Then setup rsync to backup the drives every x amounts of hours. I would then use the 500gb as a storage drive and the raptor as the boot drive and the ssd's for the sql stuff.

Should be around $500-600 to upgrade. The CPU should be fine, it won't be taxed really, ram and drive speeds are 999x more important!

I am running:
WHM 11.28.45
CENTOS 5.5 x86_64 standard on host

What are you talking about upgrading the RAM to 8 GB, if you look u will see i have mentioned have: 4 Kingston 4GB DDR3 1333 ECC/REG Memory , so that mean i have allready 16GB Ram, dude.

Who said anything about running a bunch of crons? I dont use linux crons, i use the wp robot scheduler which in turn use wp cron

The only thing you mentioned that makes sense is upgrading to the SSD's i was actually considering that

Thanks for your input

 

[matsta]

Woops didn't read that right

I'm not 100% sure how wp cron's work, but I'm guessing the still go on the hour? Your still going to get big spikes in usage. You need to have them spread out over each minute or so. That is probably your main problem right now.

It's a common problem with cPanel when you have a bunch of sites all runing awstats as the refresh every 24 hours at the exact same time, and usually if your server isn't powerful enough it will just crash.

I looked up the wp cache on the codex, wasn't much documentation there, but 99% sure it runs on the hour. So for wb robot you could change the time that it updates aka going from 60 to 72 and then 60 to 68 on another.

 

[royalmice]

Woops didn't read that right

I'm not 100% sure how wp cron's work, but I'm guessing the still go on the hour? Your still going to get big spikes in usage. You need to have them spread out over each minute or so. That is probably your main problem right now.

It's a common problem with cPanel when you have a bunch of sites all runing awstats as the refresh every 24 hours at the exact same time, and usually if your server isn't powerful enough it will just crash.

I looked up the wp cache on the codex, wasn't much documentation there, but 99% sure it runs on the hour. So for wb robot you could change the time that it updates aka going from 60 to 72 and then 60 to 68 on another.

I have disabled all on sever stat collecting software so no worries there.

Wp Cron is activated when u get visitors, so if no visitors u will never get the cron to run. My wp robot post is well scattered, like once a day and not all at the same time, they are pretty spread out.

Lets not linger on this cron thing, the reason why i want to upgrade is not because of the problem i have maybe once a week or so, i want to upgrade simply because i can..... and i want to

 

[ExCon]

royalmice, run the Linux cron instead of the wprobot default cron. It's already mentioned by the developer that the default cron takes up more resources than your own Linux cron.

HTH.

 

[docputer]

If you can afford to do so, offload your mysql to a separate server, use a crossover cable between the boxes.

 

[ExobiT]

First you install WP super cache on all your wp's, then you go install nginx as a frontend proxy that serves the static files from wp super cache to the visitors. I'll bet $100 that this will take care of all your load problems.

 

[kusai]

If I were you I would use the following

Dual Nehalem 5620
24 GB Ram
2 x 128GB SSD (for high I/O on mysql)
2 x 146GB 15K SAS Drives
-----------------------------------------
P.S Let me know when you have the above, I can host your server in my facility

 

[royalmice]

Every reply thus far focus on problem solving, but what i actually asked in the 1st place was some suggestion on what i can upgrade based on my current config

 

[dannyhw]

You're hosting your own sites? I'm not a server guru but the main things that come to mind are redundant storage, redundant power, a good ass firewall and really good security auditing in place. And however you want to do it, be able to roll everything back a few hours.

 

[mark0v]

I dont really have any problems with the server just sometimes it hangs because to many http connections.

It might be a software, not hardware, configuration problem.
Check that your maxclients is set to 256.