[BlueOnyx:09307] Re: Heavy load during lots of httpd requests

[Dogsbody]

Not disagreeing with what anyone has written so far.  When hosting sites 
you do have to plan for the maximum load which means sites can sit 
"idle" for long periods.

Robert Fitzpatrick wrote:
 > We are working on optimizing MySQL and Apache now.  Has
 > anyone dealt with this or have any recommendations for handling such
 > a hit?

Chances are the thing you want to optimise is the MaxClients setting for 
Apache.  This really should be tunes for every server install we all do. 
  I found a lovely writeup from someone a while back which mentions 
other things to check... 
http://mocko.org.uk/b/2011/01/02/how-to-survive-a-slashdotting-on-a-small-apache-server/


On 03/01/2012 19:03, Kevin Anderson wrote:
> Depending on the data that the people are retrieving, the simplest
> solution might be to just put a reverse proxy in front of it.  Squid can
> accomplish that very easily and will DRAMATICALLY reduce the load on
> your server, especially if most of the data is static.

An easy way to test this out (although I know a number of sites that use 
this in production as it's free and works so well) is to use 
http://www.cloudflare.com/ .  They act as a caching server between you 
and your users and will massively reduce load to a server.

I hope this helps

Dan