And apache, I suppose. My Ubb thread forum has relatively high traffic, this is our season. I just got another dedicated server for the site. We put mySQL on that server, keeping the other one for just HTML (I'm a newbie to this kind o stuff

We are not crashing so often now (the too many connection devil!) But we're still going down with alarming frequency.

During peak times, we have 600-700 souls on the board (250 concurrent connections to Apache.)

Is there anything I can do to these servers to tweak them for this kind of traffic?

As for Threads, should I use persistent connections or no?

Thanks

Turning on persistent connections is a bad idea if you've problems with "too many connections".

Tuning MySQL (and using MySQL 4.x) will surely increase your peformance. How this can be done depends on your server hardware etc.

You can use Jeremy's advices as a start.

Correct, persistent connections is probably a bad idea with that many users online. And like Astaran mentioned, if you can tune MySQL a bit better, that will help as well. The faster a user can execute a open a connection, make a query, and close the connection, the more connections you can process in the same amount of time.

I did check out your site, and right now even with 300 users online, it was loading quite fast. Impressive

the usual danger zone. ack!

Thanks so for the MySql instructions. We'll implement that today.

*IF* the server only does the .threads board and nothing else then I would balance the number of available apache processes and the number of MySQL connections and use persistent connections.

It the server is *not* just doing the .threads board I would not us persistent connections.

(as yes, server 2 is dedicated to MySql, Apache isn't even running on it)

Do you mean set up the round robin balancing thing? (I looked into that, yesterday. It's close to getting over my head!


Also, I figured out that we are not running the latest MySql. It's 3.x (comes with Ensim, I'm told.) Upgrading is a possibility, do you think it would greatly improve performance and more important up-time?

I can't thank you enough for your help.

MySQL 4 is a huge inprovement over 3.x

No, that isn't what I mean.

Your persistent connection will be opened by php/apache to the mysql server. By balance I mean ensuring that you do not have more apache process than maximum connections set in mysql, otherwise you run out of connections and start seeing error messages.

Be sure to leave some headroom (extra connections) so that you can command line in if you need to.

RE: Ensim -

remember, if you update to MySQL 4 you also have to rebuild PHP, mod perl, and anything else that touches MySQL. Then anything that touches anything you rebuilt. Before you know it Ensim is essentially toast. That's why our Ensim servers are still at MySQL 3.x It's also a part of the reason for this announcement

Ensim =

Agreed, but it served our purposes very well at the time. It's just time to move on.

The numbers were all within the ranges he discussed.

So not sure if anything else in MySql could be tweaked.. we moved to the my large config, also.

Is there a similiar tweak page for PhP that we should check into? I looked and didn't spot it..

TY