Babaganoosh

I help a lot of people with server issues, script problems, server moves etc. One thing I keep seeing over and over again is people complaining about excessive server load from a script getting just a little bit of traffic.

Example: Last night I was going look into server load on a dual core server with 4GB of ram. The customer was ready to get a beefier server to handle the "serious traffic" (his words, not mine). He was getting less than 30k a day across all sites but server load during the morning was causing his server to start swapping.

Most of his traffic was on a wordpress site with a bunch of video embeds. Some traffic was from an old drupal site. His host--who just so happens to post here--was recommending a new server to him. After getting a lecture from the host, they finally gave up the root login.

Apache was configured so poorly that I am surprised it worked as well as it did. Mysql settings weren't that bad but really more appropriate for a server with less ram. After reconfiguring apache and mysql I made a couple more tweaks and the load was a fraction of what it was before. Then after adding w3 total cache to his wordpress there was barely any load at all. Page load times were infinitely better too.

Since we have root the host no longer wants to support the server which I guess is ok. They didn't do their job configuring it properly in the first place or making adjustments as necessary. I'm surprised how much it happens really. I guess hosts are more interested in selling the customer a more expensive server rather than get their current server working correctly.

Hosts, take care of your customers or someone else will.