Hello,

I'm currently running a few sites on a server with these specs:

Intel Core I5 760 2.8 GHZ Processor with 8 MB cache
2 GB RAM
150 GB HD, but that's not really important in this situation.

Well, recently I guess one of my site's been getting more traffic. There's no particular reason, but it's just been receiving more traffic. If I had to guess, it probably gets about 6,000-7,000 hits per day.

Now of late, Apache has been hanging regularly. I've been trying to resolve this with the host, who has helped me to tweak some things, but still it hangs a few times a day— at least two, three, or even four times a day for the last week or so. When it isn't caught right away, loads get up to 30-40 and sometimes the server has to be rebooted remotely to regain access.

It's been behaving for the most part today, though I've restarted it once or twice this morning.

So, is it too much for this server? I can easily upgrade, but would have to pay about $50 extra for basically 4 GB RAM and a 2 core processor. I'm still evaluating whether it is worth it, or whether I should continue debugging the issue. The site is a simple Drupal installation with caching enabled in all possible places.

maybe ???

6,000-7,000 per day is not that much is there a possibility that a plug in is causing the issue

You should easily improve the performance and stop Apache from hanging using more diverse software solutions.

What do you currently use as the hosting software infrastructure?

Have you looked into CloudLinux, xcache and similar?

install Litespeed on your server, this will improve performance

List all the plugins you have installed as it may be one of those.

Having lots of just bad ones can cause quite heavy load.

You might want to optimize your webserver first, the specs that you described above are sufficient.

You should really optimize the server more or try something other than apache, it is not that heavy yet for that spec server.

Before you go swapping out software and HOPING for results, you need to know exactly what is happening on your server.

Is it Apache that's having issues, if so, optimize it.
Is it MySQL processing that's hogging too much memory, if so, optimize it.
Is it a memory bottleneck, if so, optimize it.
Is it software related on the clients end - guess what you need to do?

Changing out software and hoping for the best is not a solution, it's a potential temporary fix, but the issue will come up again. Getting a bigger server is also not the solution without knowing what the problem is.

Others will say that 2GB memory is very low, and to add memory. Again, if you have a memory leak or scripts are running for long periods of time without releasing memory, then adding memory won't solve the issue either.

You need to actually investigate what is happening, why it's hanging, and remove "maybe" from your vocabulary. If you can't do this, and your host can't assist, then you need to hire a server management company that can find the issue and help resolve it.

It is sufficient however the amount of clicks you're getting isn't really that much compared to other sites that may be using the same server specifications as you are.

Clicks are not something that should be measured as a single factor. If I have a static HTML site and get 20 clicks (each page less than 100K, that's vastly different than a dynamic website where pages are 3-5MB

It comes down to I/O on the drive, I/O on the CPU/Memory and I/O on bandwidth. You need to first find the cause before you can find the solution. Comparing "clicks" is a worthless measurement as you don't know what each click actually does.

Yes, it seems that the problem was being caused by modules. I disabled a couple groups of modules and the site's been stable for a few days now. Thank you for your, and everyone else's responses.

Oh.. I am a little bit too late. but I am happy your issue is resolved already