Dedicated Server - Digg Front Page - Internal Server Error

I have a dedicated server, and whenever my site hits the front page of digg it still gets the internal server error due to to many hits at once. I do use a cache as well to help.

Is there an adjustment or something I can make to allow for more cpu?

 

cache is the first thing i would do, the second would be the trim down any unnecessary processes which may be running

 

Definitely do a check of what processes are running. For example, see how many database queries your server has to do for each page load. Trim it down on at least the target page, if not on the rest of the site as well.

 

Yes the SQL query count is one of the major reasons why sites fall over in a Digg rush. If you have nested queries for instance, you would be better off reworking the queries as either JOINS or multi table queries.
The aim would be to get as much information from one query as possible!

 

Give more info ... only thing I can say is have a small html page with no sql queries on the front ...

 

I've made some adjustments to my server that may help some.

 

I wonder how they configured the server for digg.com itself to handle such traffic.

 

I doubt it is just one server, probably a cluster of servers.

 

It's most certainly more than one server.

One of my sites on a VPS recently hit the front page of Digg. It went down almost instantly but I logged into WHM and noticed that it was mainly Apache that was having serious issues. I simply restarted that service and the website was back up. I had to do it a couple times over the space of a few hours, and it worked pretty well. I'm not sure if that's exactly what you're supposed to do, but I did it and it seemed successful.

 

And with shared hosting, you will be down in seconds.

 

I rebooted the server and the site was back up for about a minute and the it went down again.

Shared hosting definitely won't last long. They will think the server is under attack.

 

attack, most certainly. We shut down VPS' and Shared accounts here at work when they start affecting the other clients. I think we have 10 - 11 temporary shutdowns performed on average each day from the digg effect on servers which are not intended for that sort of traffic, or cannot handle it without affecting the other clients on the box.

 

I thought so.

Anyway, is using LiteSpeed (www.litespeedtech.com) really faster than apache? anyone tried it?
may be this can be an alternate solution for single server

 

I recommend Private Dedicated Servers if you are ready to experience Digg FrontPage. I am a power user at Digg, FP sends HUGE traffic, My servers always crashed when I was on Shared hosting .