High server load a problem

[VikingStar]

I had a site with over 100,000 hits per day, stable traffic from hard links and SE, than one day it dropped to 50,000 hits per day and never recovered. Now after 2 months im still at the 50k hits.

Under these 2 months I noticed that my server often has a high server load, for a couple of hours each time.
"Server Load 8.51 (2 cpus)"
And during that time my site seams to be much slower.

So im not sure what to do, can high server load slow up a website?
What can I do? Can also someone please tell me more about high server load issue?



Thanks!

[kmanrox]

im no server guru, but yes high load can slow your server bigtime... I believe anything over 4 is bad, over 11 is basically locked-up... do you have programs running in your crontab like stats parsers or something?

either way, if you have a good host, tell them your issue and have them look into it... phatservers always gives me a great explanation and tweaking when necessary.

[Babaganoosh]

High load will definitely cause your sites to load slowly. Run the command "top" and watch to see which processes are hogging the cpu. If you can't track it down, hire a contract server admin. Grouchy admin on GFY is good. I've also had a lot of luck with http://www.admingeekz.com

[VikingStar]

Originally Posted by kmanrox

im no server guru, but yes high load can slow your server bigtime... I believe anything over 4 is bad, over 11 is basically locked-up... do you have programs running in your crontab like stats parsers or something?

either way, if you have a good host, tell them your issue and have them look into it... phatservers always gives me a great explanation and tweaking when necessary.

Thanks for the info man, appreciate it!

Originally Posted by Babaganoosh

High load will definitely cause your sites to load slowly. Run the command "top" and watch to see which processes are hogging the cpu. If you can't track it down, hire a contract server admin. Grouchy admin on GFY is good. I've also had a lot of luck with http://www.admingeekz.com

Thanks man, will probably do that.
Im have a server with theplanet.com but thay dont know anything and dont care.

[Babaganoosh]

Originally Posted by VikingStar

Thanks for the info man, appreciate it!




Thanks man, will probably do that.
Im have a server with theplanet.com but thay dont know anything and dont care.

I have two with theplanet.com. They are unmanaged so it's not really their job to care. Are you using cpanel by chance? If so I bet the log processing is fucking you up. I had to disable some logging and change when and how often logs were processed. I tweaked apache and mysql as well and now my loads on my busiest server sit around .3-.4 at peak hours.

[Babaganoosh]

Haha, I spoke too soon. My main server is at 2.2 right now. Looks like it's just a spike but it still irks me to see that.

[Scott-Mc]

You can run with slightly high load (a load of 4 isn't really a big deal) without much difficulty it would ultimately depend on how slow your website is loading.

With the amount of processors most new systems have load isn't really a good way to monitor something, providing it loads quickly then you can assume it's fine.

It's going to have to be extremely slow for it to cause some serious effects to half your traffic (That is assuming that is the problem and you just havn't been dropped from the SE/link that was giving you most of the traffic).

[VikingStar]

Originally Posted by Babaganoosh

I have two with theplanet.com. They are unmanaged so it's not really their job to care. Are you using cpanel by chance? If so I bet the log processing is fucking you up. I had to disable some logging and change when and how often logs were processed. I tweaked apache and mysql as well and now my loads on my busiest server sit around .3-.4 at peak hours.

YES exactly, log processing, server failing etc...
Its a pain in the ass, I have a couple of servers with them since 2004
I have probably received thousand emails so far about high server loads on all servers, I talked with their support many times about it, paid them $150 per hour to solve the problem each time, like create a log rotation or something like that... sometimes they solved the problem for a moment, but its always keeps hunting me.

So I really need help from people who know this stuff, will only deal with professionals, what companies are to be trusted out there, I need server cleaning, security, tweaking etc..

[VikingStar]

Originally Posted by Scott-Mc

You can run with slightly high load (a load of 4 isn't really a big deal) without much difficulty it would ultimately depend on how slow your website is loading.

With the amount of processors most new systems have load isn't really a good way to monitor something, providing it loads quickly then you can assume it's fine.

It's going to have to be extremely slow for it to cause some serious effects to half your traffic (That is assuming that is the problem and you just havn't been dropped from the SE/link that was giving you most of the traffic).

Thanks Scott, I will contact you soon, so your people can take a look at this..

[ladida]

Originally Posted by kmanrox

I believe anything over 4 is bad, over 11 is basically locked-up...

This is wrong. It strongly depends on the server setup. I've seen server setups that constantly run on 10-20 load and they work fine, even faster then some servers with a load of 3. Record holder is some server with virtual sites that was running on 800 load. I honestly have no idea how they managed that, but it was going from 500 to 800, then would crash after 20 or so hours, restart, and all over again, with all sites on the server working during the load.