[BlueOnyx:09301] Re: Heavy load during lots of httpd requests

[Robert Fitzpatrick]

On 1/3/2012 10:53 AM, Chris Gebhardt - VIRTBIZ Internet wrote:
> Robert Fitzpatrick wrote:
>> I have a customer with a BlueOnyx VPS that produces tons of httpd
>> processes and the load goes above 100, yes 100+, and of course brings
>> the server to a halt when it is hit by tons of requests at one time.
>> There is a tweet sent out by someone who has 2 million followers to got
>> to the site to buy a book and it takes down this VPS. After we block
>> traffic, restart Apache to purge existing connections and open all back
>> again, everything is fine, until the next tweet. It just cannot handle
>> the initial hit. We are working on optimizing MySQL and Apache now. Has
>> anyone dealt with this or have any recommendations for handling such a hit?
> 
> We have a bit of experience with this sort of thing.  For instance, one 
> of our customers handles all the social media for major recording 
> artists, the largest being the "Lady" who wears the meat dress.  So you 
> can imagine they get fairly heavily loaded whenever "she" sends a tweet.
> 
> Go ahead and optimize your MySQL and Apache, but the answer is likely to 
> be "more power".
> 

Thanks Chris. When you say more power, you mean move them to a dedicated
server off the VPS or extend more CPU/RAM to the VPS? It didn't seem the
RAM was an issue as it does not pull anything from Swap while under
heavy load. The CPU seems to go under heavy load due to the number of
httpd processes running, which in turn seem to be waiting on a response
from something else.
--
Robert <robert at webtent.org>