Is switching to http://www.lighttpd.net/ possible? I've heard its has a smaller memory footprint, is faster than Apache, making these spikes easier to deal with. Eric On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 1:19 PM, Matt Graham wrote: > From: Dan Dubovik > > If you are running into issues with too many httpd processes spinning up, > > Why do people call problems "issues"? > > > You could run into similar constraints if you hit MaxClients (assuming > > apache here?) Is the cause of the load from the web server spinning up a > bunch > > of processes all of a sudden? Or from the code it is attempting to parse > / > > deliver? Increasing the number of servers that are started up could also > > help in preventing a spike of load if it is the former. > > 256M RAM means there's a hard and relatively low limit on the number of > apache > processes you can start. About 10 or 12 seems to be the max here. I tried > adjusting MaxClients, ServerLimit, MaxRequestsPerChild, *buffer_size, > query_cache* , and so forth in httpd.conf and my.cnf according to what > other > people said worked for them in the slicehost wiki and forum. Nothing > helped. > RAM is AFAICT the limiting factor on a cheap slice, since almost nobody > runs > production stuff on boxes with that little RAM. > > > it seems that having that 30 second sleep in the middle of a bunch > > of traffic, would go against the (supposed) goal of driving traffic > > 30 second downtime, or 4 hour downtime? Traffic is secondary to having the > box stay up without manual intervention; if some people get 404s for a > while, > oh well. The sleep() could probably be reduced to 15. I know 30 works > though. > > If this were some sort of profit-generating site, I'd have sprung for a > more > expensive slice with more RAM, and these problems probably never would've > come > up. However, there are probably people out there who don't have a lot of > money and are facing similar problems. > > -- > Matt G / Dances With Crows > The Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress/ > There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see > > > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss >