Thread

Hi,

We are having an issue with our EE site. under a fairly small amount of traffic (150+ users) Apache seems to be crashing intermittently, and then restarting. This can happen within seconds of each crash. To resolve the issue we have tried increasing the ram from 4GB to 8GB, which helped a little, but immediately during medium use only had 1.5GB free.

The server setup is as follows:

  * EE v2.1.3
  * Apache 2.2.16, Debian Linux, Php 5.3.3-7, mySQL 5.1.61
  * Dedicated sever with 8GB RAM, AMD Opteron 2.6ghz 512kb cache Quad core

We have tried load balancing, but still get the same issue. Also we have enabled template caching, which sped up page serve times, but did not stop apache crashes.

Can you shed any light on what areas to pursue to resolve the issue? We have in-depth data we can make available if that help.

Thanks,

Ben

To keep this updated:

We have increased the amount of RAM mySQL can use to 160MB which has improved stability. However, we are still seeing crashes intermittently.

Thanks

Hey Pagemakers,

I am sorry to hear you are running into this problem.

I think the best route for you is to consult a Server Administrator. I say this because an admin would be able to get a better understanding of your current server situation and business needs and make a suggestion.

This being said, increasing the memory was a good start. Beyond the hardware, system tuning is a must.

To know where to start it will be good to see what the system is telling us. Look through /var/log/messages for these crashes. (/var/log/httpd/access and /var/log/httpd/error as well) What caused these crashes? Why is Apache crashing? Too many connections? Is MySQL eating processes and memory? If so then is this caused by excessive reads or writes? Each of these questions will require different actions. Most of which can be done pretty easily with an afternoon of coffee and Google.

I am sure you have tried running top to see where system resources are going. You might also try ntop (apt-get install ntop) which is easier for the non-admin to use.

I hope this is helpful. Please let me know if there are any questions I can answer.

Cheers,

Hi Shane,

Thanks for the reply and the advice. We have a pretty strong server team working on this who are tweaking settings to optimise performance - I will pass on your information. Again to update, We recently upgraded RAM on the server to 32GB and have split the mySQL and Apache onto separate servers, which has again improved the stability. However we still see occasional crashes - 2 every 4 days or so.

We are going to try upgrading EE from 2.1.3 to is 2.4. to see if this improves performance. I am sure you will recommend this, but do you think that it will show any major performance improvements?

Thanks

Hi Pagemakers,

It’s very possible, but I think the real issue is with the server, which you are addressing now.

Please let me know how things go, I am hoping your headache goes away once your server team has worked their magic.

Cheers,