Hello everyone, I need some help. I have a Virtual Private server, CentOS, about 832 megs of memory, dual processor quad core Intel chips. At any given time the server has 300+ megs of free memory. System specs: PHP 5.2.4 PHP Memory Limit 256.00 MB MySQL Version 5.0.51a-community MySQL Packet Size 1,023.0 KB Apache v1.3.39 PHP Max Post Size 8.00 MB On this server I am running 5 sites, but only one site gets a lot of traffic. The big site gets over 1.8 million page views a month, runs VBulletin forum software, over 328,079 post, over 8,200 members and the database is 514 megs big. On average between 700 - 900 members visit every 24 hours. The other sites get a few thousand hits a month. Over the past week I am experiencing timeout problems. The pages can take 5 - 10 seconds to load, and some scripts timeout - such as the MYSQL backup script I use. I thought about increasing the PHP Max Post Size, from 8.00 MB to something like 128 MB. But I am not sure that is the problem. Any suggestions on how to increase performance??
That is a broad question. Could you be a little more specific? The only extra stuff I have done is dedicate a certain amount of memory to PHP, had e-Accelerator installed and Zend memory manager is installed. Besides that, what do you suggest?
Do any of the scripts make external connections? Do they connect to other servers? I have seen instances where PHP scripts load slow because they are grabbing RSS feeds from external sources. And when those RSS feeds are down, or when the DNS for those RSS feeds is not resolving, this makes the PHP script load very slowly. Not sure if that is the case here, but thought I would throw that out as a possible option.
The only things that I know of that connects to an external site are my tracking tags. I directly measure my traffic using Quantcast and google anaylitcs.
Sorry, but cannot be more specific. It really depends on each environment. Google apache, mysql optimization, you will see what I mean. However, it seems you have no idea about the server management, I would suggest you hire an experience admin to do it for you. Otherwise, you might end up with worse result. Don't just take other configuration to apply to your server.