Anguish wrote:The Radish wrote:Rockhawk and Anguish were talking about this problem in the mod forum today. Trying to plan long term what to do about it.
They are planning on making the next move in time for draft day which till now has been the most posters at once.
Over the weekend I saw over 2,800 posters at once just on the forum plus what ever more in the chat room, which is seperate.
Think Sailor saw even more.
Same but different. Smokin was right, a couple config tweaks needed to be made. Unfortunately I was in an aeropuerto in the middle of nowhere Mexico yesterday afternoon.
Webserver tuning can be such a pain in the ass. I host a couple high traffic community sites and use NginX to serve static content while Apache (via mod-php) handles the PHP, which is what I suspect you are doing here (perhaps php-fpm instead of Apache). APC is used to cache php opcodes while memcached is employed to store session data such that multiple web servers can be implemented and subsequently load balanced.
In all of that configuratin', the hardest thing to tune was PHP concurrency settings as setting values too high will cause you to run out of RAM in high load situations (very bad as it causes paging to disk and horrible slowness while disk queues lengthen) while setting it too low will cause server busy or gateway unavailable issues. php-fpm is a lot better than mod-php in terms of memory usage, but can bottleneck as it relies on sockets or TCP for piping data in and out.
If the site is presently hosted on a single server solution, moving up to a multi-server solution will cost a pretty penny (slightly more than double the cost unless "smaller" virtual servers are employed), and will require a lot of mojo to configure properly (multi-master database replication, distributed PHP session data, rsyncing of user data, etc). If you guys want any recommendations or an extra brain to help with some design issues, by all means feel free to ask. I'm a busy guy these days, but I have no problem advising on a solution.