Hi everybody!
I have some high-traffic Web sites on my dedicated server caused High Server Load (sometimes 3.18 (1 cpu) or more WHM cpanel) .what should I do? do I need upgrade my server ?
Thank you.

If you're sure that it's the traffic that raising the load like that, then most likely yes. What are the server specs? Does the server become drastically slower during these times?

Many Thanks for reply .Server Specs:Intel Pentium IV 2.8GHz 1GB DDRAM Memory . I havent feel slower function during these times.

Are these websites database driven? Perhaps you can try to optimize MySQL or change some apache values and see what effects they have on load.

However, upgrading will most likely be your best choice.

I would recommend looking into what sites exactly are causing the high server load - perhaps those clients would be interested in a dedicated server of their own, and once they're on a dedicated server their site would probably run better, and anyone else they were effecting would run better.

Paste the output of the top -c when the load is increasing.

Hi,
Looking at top from shell can help.
Also, you may want to type in ;
watch pstree
from shell.

That will show you all running processes as well as how many instances each is running.
If your running a high load and look at that, it will show you if there are a ton of httpd,(web pages) exim, or other email programs, and let you know if it is a particular thing that is driving up the load.

You can have a busy site, and not kill the server, but from the sounds of it without seeing top and pstree, it is hard to say if you need a better,(stronger) server.

It could well be a spammer hitting your server and many times you can see that simply by looking at the pstree, and seeing a ton of email servers running.

If it is simply web pages, then look into which of the busy sites are getting hit the hardest, and perhaps offer two or three of them to share a dedicated, so they can afford it better.

If that's not an option, then look into a pent 3.3, and maybe double your ram.
Also, with real busy sites, you will have hard drive failures more often. Look into a raid mirror drive system to say up when the main disk crashes. Make sure to do daily, weekly, and monthly backups also. Some times, the currupt data from the bad hard drive will move onto the mirror drive. Then you will need the backups.

Tim L

Hi,

Have you ever thought about getting a cluster with a couple of nodes and balance the load between those nodes?
Think about a 4 node cluster with the same specs as your actual server. I believe that would make a big difference.

regards,
Gabriel.

I would find out what is causing the server load to go up, it could be something as a simple as a bad cgi script file that doesn't close.

On the other hand you may want to evaluate your current hardware specs. If your hosting 500 sites on this server then I would say upgrading to a more powerful server is definetly something you would want to look into.

If there are several database driven sites on this server and even after you optimize MySQl the server load is still high you may want to look at the possibility of seperating your solution into a two server configuratino with the first server running Apache and the second handling all the MySQL traffic.

On the other hand if you are only hosting 50 sites on this box then any of the above suggestions could more then likley be what is causing the load spike.

If the server is not slowing down as you stated earlier then you really have nothing to worry about.
A server load of 3 is not a big issue if you don't notice a degradation in performance.

That being said it's always good to check through things and make sure everything is optimized.

to be real with you , i'll watch the loads in the next few weeks ... loads can be from mass email that an account has made

Definitely check through all of your logs and see if any user is using excessive resources. If you find that someone is using excessive resources then suspend their account and give them analysis of the problem at hand.

Hopefully you have a clause in your TOS for this sort of circumstance, because if you are hosting sites on a shared server, you cannot avoid having a clause specifying usage limits. Basically meaning, they cannot use more resources than average, as they are sharing those resources with others.

So if you have this aspect written into your tos, then suspend and make sure they are made aware of the problem, so they can fix it. If there is no problem with any specific site, that you can find, then consider upgrading to a better server. But with your specs, you shouldn't have to consider this, unless of course you are hosting a number of heavy resource database driven sites, in which case you should be charging a lot, while avoiding hosting too many sites on one server, no matter the specs.

Hope this helps.

Hi Sina, you will have to post more information if you want an answer instead of a speculation . The load could be due to anything... even a stuck pico process that would go away with a simple kill command.

You may want to try eaccelerator to cache your scripts if you are running a php/mysql driven site.