Website slows down at PEAK HOURS

Hello guys, these are my curent server configurations:

Ram: 32GB
CPU: 12 CPUS (don't know their performance, the server is from DigitalOcean)
Transfer: 7TB


I curently have Varnish, Nginx, Memcached, W3 Total Cache (wordpress plugin) installed on my server. But the problem is that when I send A LOT of visitors in my site, it starts to slow down (yet the CPU usage is far from HIGH), which makes it weird.

Any suggestions?

you're not CPU constrained, you're probably experiencing I/O constraints... most likely either disk-based or network-based.

Also, depending on what your load looks like at peak, your requests could be queueing and looking like they're slowing down... but really they're just waiting to be processed.

Is there a reason you need a large, monolithic server versus multiple smaller servers that can easily be scaled out during peak hours? Without knowing more about your requirements, that's something you might look into. It can make it a lot easier to plan resources and ensure a responsive site under virtually any load. Especially if there are regular patterns to your peak loads.

That's a very good answer bro.
I've never heard of responsive hostings before, can u please give me a link or something to check out more? Or maybe a company that offers such type of hosting?

Thank you.

BackY said:

That's a very good answer bro.
I've never heard of responsive hostings before, can u please give me a link or something to check out more? Or maybe a company that offers such type of hosting?

Thank you.

Click to expand...

With the setup you're running, Amazon AWS is the obvious choice, I would think. Maybe look at Rackspace or even some of the smaller ones that have specialized hosting, like LiquidWeb.

But Amazon AWS will have tons of documentation on how to create a load-balanced cluster of smaller servers instead of a single large server.

In my opinion, Azure is the easiest to scale... but it's MS architecture, so it won't be a good fit for what you're currently running.

First I wish people stops going to Amazon or Rackspace "cloud" base hosting when they have a issue.

Amazon will cost you 50000000% times more cost then what your using and wont do what your needing to do. You have an issue and going with a "cloud" base solution wont fix your issue. Your be going to from something powerful to something that is 1/100th of the power, it will get worse than better and to fix it with a cloud it will cost you an easy 1k / month for a bandaid fix.

First, in your peak hours, log in to your server and run some test to look at the IO, bandwidth, and so on. Find out WHY! it's slowing down.
It could be your database not being able to keep up with your request. If that is the case give the database more ram.. You have more than enough. If its Apache not able to keep up find out why, it is IO, CPU, and so on.

You have tons of options to FIX! your issue and not just put a bandaid on it.