Im using a VPS but keep having issues,,, slow,not loading pages etc

Hi Guys,

Im hoping some one can help me out with this.

I currently have a self managed VPS with 3.5GB RAM and 100GB SSD storage (hosted locally as well)

However we build eBay stores and when our clients run eBay promos on home pages it instantly caused issues and things stop loading or load very slow.

I already put STATIC content on AWS however I wanted to know would be the best solution to move my entire domain to AWS. Is the elastic option the right one and how hard is it to setup including NS records etc??

FYI - I don't have any DBs setup on the domain that I want to move to AWS however I do have a link when clicked on redirects them to another domain where they need to sign it and then redirects them back.

Really hope someone can help me out with this.

thanks guys

Danny

 

It depends on many factors. What kind of VPS container is there? Xen, OpenVZ, Virtuozzo or it is KVM?

 

What does the load/resource usage look like on the VPS when this happens, any different than normal, is it still responsive in other aspects? SSD's are quite fast so not sure if I'd suspect I/O but I assume you may have already checked this?

 

Hi and thanks for the reply.

@ Kaslo im not really sure. The company im with is called Crucial... You can see the packages by googling 'crucial australia hosting' (the link didnt work so ive just re edited this). While they have good customer server i just find that im frozen when it comes to issues like this. If you click on 'order now' you will see more info on it. I currently have the best seller one with a few add ons such as firewalls, backups, log cleaner etc

@ ironcladservers, When the server gets the spike as it did today our entire server stops. It would either be painfully slow or wont load at all. Attached is the latest stats that I have. As you can see today's stats are not included but what I can say is that our client is running a massive eBay campaign and they are a really reputable brand in Australia. The campaign is on eBays home page, emails and my eBay section so its getting alot of exposure. I didnt know this until someone from eBay contacted me this morning telling me about the campaign and that the store is experiencing issues.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards

Danny

 

The first suggestion would be to offload your static assets to a CDN but you have already done that. I think your VPS is under powered for what you want to do. You are doing a lot of queries? How many files must be included to generate one page view (or data request)? Wordpress, for example, requires 80 PHP file includes to generate the output for the home page. Every time a page is requested, Wordpress has to go to disk 80 times to seek, read, load, compile, and execute 80 PHP files. If you are getting 20,000 - 30,000 views per day, multiply those views by the number of file includes and get a rough idea.

You really do not provide much information about what scripting language you are using. PHP? Something else? There are a number of accelerators you can use if you are running PHP, depending on your setup, that will cache opcode in RAM and reduce server resource consumption and speed things up quite a bit. But your amount of RAM is pretty low to be using an accelerator.

Have you looked at CloudFlare? I know a lot of people seem to be big on Amazon, but I have read some negative things about them.

 

thanks for the reply bilzo.

Im currently using 2 sets of PHP code, 1 is to show the eBay categories dynamically and the other to show related items which caches every 6 hours.

In terms of links each store has about 20-25 different links including those in the CSS file.

I've looked at cloudflare however it caused issues with clients when they where changing slideshows and banners as it seems to cloudflare was caching and not show the update js files (which contain the updated banners)

Looking around I thought maybe Amazon EC2 would do the job.

Attached is the latest states including yesterdays (sunday) when the server had issues.

How much RAM do you think would be ideal?? Keep in mind that each week we are adding about 3-4 new clients to server as well which is why I was thinking about EC2

Thanks again for input.

Danny

 

Those stats aren't going to tell us much, as we are unaware how each hit/pageview taxes your system resources. The entire server stops, as in you are no longer able to SSH into it, or as in the web pages/images won't load anymore? Does it at least continue to ping? Have you verified Apache's settings are optimized to handle the type of load you're trying to have it process? Using suphp or mod_php? Worker or prefork MPM? How much CPU allocation does your VPS have? Did you check the disk I/O? There's lots of things here that could play a role in how well your VPS handles this, so I wouldn't necessarily say you need to upgrade or change anything service provider wise just yet.

 

how can I get the stats?? is there an option in cpanel ?

 

When I see the hits column, I am thinking that total hits is requests for everything, all page requests, images, CSS files, Javascript, etc. A VPS with only 2 cores and 3.5 GB of RAM is severely under powered to serve 877,000 requests per day. Amazon may be the direction you should go in considering you are continuing to grow. Otherwise, you are going to have to look at load balanced servers and stuff like that.

Good luck on growing your website! It would be great if you could report back with what you ended up going with and how well it is working as other people can learn from it.

 

Hi billzo,

thanks again for the input.

I have decided to go with Amazon Web Services EC2. I've got in and setup a M1 Medium server. Its got pretty much the same power as the VPS however the EC2 i believe would increase power if needed when the spike happens. Usually only on Sundays when eBay run Sunday Deals. This week they are planning a massive one so I need to make sure it can accommodate the traffic and view so I think the EC2 would be the best solution.

Thanks again for everyone's input.

Regards

Danny

 

good choice. Let me know your experience with Amazon. Havent used EC2 yet but thinking about it.