Hi i have one question, my site has too much stuff so the site is quite slow. And I see the graphs on my control panel showing 90% usage ( almost half of them are caching ones i guess). So if i increase the RAM, would my site be faster? Any estimation? Thanks.
It is hard to say really. There are 3 factors from my experience which determines speed, 1) CPU Speed, 2) RAM and 3) Disk Speed CPU speed is pretty obvious as that would determine the highest performance you can get from your server. As for RAM, sometimes when you fully use your allocated RAM, the computer will use virtual memory which typically means that it would use the harddisk as your temporary working area. Since disk speed is slower than RAM, it would mean that if your computer is swapping a lot then your sites would look slow. In this instant, adding more RAM would indeed help reduce the need for swapping. Disk Speed is an issue too if your site has a lot of database access or has dynamic contents which requires a lot of disk access, using a faster harddisk such as a SCSI or a SATA drive with a big disk cache would indeed help too. In your case, if you see a lot of caching then yes, increase RAM would help provided that the CPU is not already overloaded.
I've never noticed a speed increase on web sites, from adding RAM to the server. It's called your internet access speed. Dial-up? Knock it down to under 100K of images on the pages.
if you site uses scripts try optimizing them if you get allot of traffic just improving the most browsed pages by a few percent is a few more percent of your cpu load.
Firstly, you can check the CPU load. Its the main factor th site relies Now, as eddy said RAM is fine if your system has SCSI or SATA HDD because normally, every linux takes 2 GB Space for SWAP.
Issue the command "free -m", is it showing very few free memory and a lot of swap usage? If so then maybe is time to upgrade RAM. Just remember that this could be due to an apache or php not properly configured, so review the configuration of your main services before ordering the upgrade. You can see which services are consuming more RAM by running the command "top -c" and then press "M". It will order the toplist by memory usage. Good luck
You need to be waaaay more specific. That's like saying my car is a bit slow and the lights are blinking, should I get a new engine? Is this a physical dedicated server or vps? How much ram do you have now? How much ram is utilized and how much swap? How about cpu? Raid drives? Explain 90% usage I assume you have root access to this box, have you checked top? or mytop? Otherwise, we'll be throwing darts all day
I guess it is RAM. Since its almost impossible to use that much swap(the site would go down/or server will crash before that) Its of RAM as Server Load(CPU load) is stated as 0.xx etc.
I got 1 GB ram. dedicated server. ok here are the graphics: As you can see ram is much highly used than cpu. Can ram reach like 90% without cpu reaching like 90%?
It would be nice if you posted the meanings of the three colors used in your memory graph. Without that, it is impossible to read.
sorry, those are in this image under the graph other thing i didn't understand is why ram can be used too much without using cpu that much. sometimes CPU spikes way up, but only for like few seconds/ minutes. i wonder why.