slickhog.com

Although I didn’t plan this to be an experiment, it fits well in the Experiments category. Having recently moved to a dedicated server for the very first time, I had no idea what to expect in terms of performance, server crashes, and a host of other things. I certainly didn’t expect that the server would crash due to a high volume of traffic.

I ordered an AMD Athlon X2 Dual Core 3800 with 2 GB of RAM and 120 GB hard rive, it’s on the low-end of servers offered at my hosting company. I’m paying about $240/month for it. I’m also subscribing to a service providing live visitor statistics for the site.

Yesterday I got an email from the server notifying me that a whole lot of processes were interrupted and the server rebooted itself. I didn’t think much of it, I’ve never had a dedicated server before and quite frankly didn’t think much of this message.

This morning on my way to work, I wanted to add a couple of news stories that were ready for publication. I pulled over to some parking lot and started up my laptop. To my surprise my site was down. The control panel wasn’t responding either. I immediately called the hosting company and was told that the server crashed due to a high number of visitors accessing the site. It’s programmed to reboot if the site is inaccessible for 1 minute. Nice feature, although I would prefer for the server to handle any visitors that may come.

Visitors = money.

The server was back up in a matter of minutes. I checked my stats and noticed that at the time when the server crashed, my site was being accessed simultaneously by a little over 700 visitors. I also looked at the stats from the day before at the time when the server also crashed. It appeared that the problem occurred when a little under 700 visitors were accessing the site at the same time.

Later today I did some research, talked to the people at the hosting company and a couple of other individuals from the field. There are 3 ways of dealing with the problem:

1. Increase RAM from 2 GB to 4GB, extra cost: $50/month
2. Faster CPU, the next higher level of a CPU that I could get is a Dual Opteron, extra cost: $50/month
3. Load balancing with a second server, extra cost: $240/month

Increasing the size of RAM and/or upgrading the CPU are only short-term fixes. Load balancing seems to be the most professional way of dealing with the problem, unfortunately it’s the costliest.

Since I get this high volume traffic in bursts, once every few days for an hour or two, it makes sense for me to try the least expensive solution - upgrading to 4GB RAM. I’ll let you know if this has fixed any of the problems, at least for the time being.