My server is becoming ill and I cant find out how to cure it :s
These are the symptoms :
- Everything ran smooth for about 3 months, but suddenly a week ago it became very slow most of the time.
- server works fine when there are very few visitors on the site. When that numbers goes above 300-350 everything slows down, load raises to +/- 10 and does not lower anymore and it becomes nearly impossible to make normal use of the site. Then the load slowly raises to 20-25 and it only becomes worse. But a few weeks ago, I could easily hold 700-800 users with a load of 5-10 and hardly any notable delays. (online user : registered member that was active past 10 minutes)
- when you first visit the site or reload a page after 10 mins, it reacts very slow, seems like it takes 10 to 30 seconds before it starts giving you a new page. Once you are being served and click around, then sometimes everything seems ok and fast, but once you stop again you lose "it" and it all reacts slow again.
- sometimes longer pages dont come at once, you get the beginning, it stops for 10 seconds, and then you get the rest. Looking at the html source code, the first part is mostly around 16kb.
- there is a mysql database that was 1.4 gig in size, has 160 tables and about 5.5 million records. But those numbers should not be a problem I think.
- running apache2, and I tried a lot of config variations in number of processes and servers and timeoutvalues and such. Nothing seems to make any real difference.
- I did a reboot (115 days uptime
), but nothing changed- I suspect that the cause might be at mysqld though, because on few occasions only apache was running and mysqld was off or restarting, and the site went very very fast . The page was filled with mysql errors because there was no db connection, but still it was fast even at peak times.
I'm starting to become desperate here... Does anyone have any suggestion on where I should search for problems or how I might solve it ?
Thanks
