I just moved my sites over to a Linux dedicated server. One wordpress embedded video site gets around 12,000 uniques per day. My server load hovers around 1.2 and sometimes jumps to 8 or 9 for 5 or 15 minutes at a time. I've accessed my website when the server load shows 5 and did not experience a slowdown. Do I need to be concerned about this, especially if I don't notice any performance dedgradation? If so, are there any standard apache log files I should be looking at to see what is putting such a load on the server? I'm new at all of this dedicated server stuff and am not very knowledgable. Thanks.
Open your WHM and follow the following steps to see which process is taking load Main >> System Health >> Show Current CPU Usage You can easily kill the process which is taking too much load. try it out
If your script is using MYsql Database then you need to optimize your db for maximum connections Thanks Tulip
Identify what's causing the bottleneck apache, mysql or both. Optimize mysql, use php caching and wordpress object caching (I can do it professionally if needed).
Yeah sure you can try that out, and other option would be to ask your host to optimize your Apache and mysql according to the resources. It might solve the problem too.
Good suggestion ... unfortunately my dedicated server host is Godaddy, and as they advertise they will do NOTHING after turning over the server to you. Hell, you even have to prepay 3 months of server hosting and assisted management services ($900 total upfront) for the privilage of being able to pay them an hourly rate to look at you machine. THAT is why I am switching to Hostgator after just one month of Godaddy dedicated server hosting. Still pisses me off. But thanks again.
Oh lol...you're still stuck to godaddy and hostgator for dedicated servers? Wake up...! $300/month can get you a monster server elsewhere!
Agreed you can definately get a cheaper box elsewhere with the same specs as these huge companies. If you are familiar with editing the configuration files through SSH I can send you some methods of optimization through PM. Sounds like you will need to install something like eAccelerator or Zend Optimizer as well.
As a rule of thumb, i would login as root and check CPU usage and Apache status. Also server status may not report current values. They may be reflected from an earlier point in time. I would just ask your host where you have the box hosted.
Yeah, you may be right about that. I believe I've heard that before. I have it mega-customized with plugins .... that probably isn't helping either.
Well it appears most of the load is due to the videos you are serving. The main bottleneck is probably your bandwidth and disk storage so you might want to look at how you can scale those. Have you thought about moving them to a CDN (content delivery network)? That may not be suitable for you, cost wise, but you can have the data served from a separate server, optimized for just this task. Then add more such servers once the usage demands it.