Re: FN-FORUM: Help! Apache server being hammered and site keeps falling over!

date posted 1st November 2007 10:20

I had a similar problem in the past. And, just so you are aware of few things.

1) Sudden increase in users - how many users are you seeing. Normally
apache is quite capable of scaling. Of course provided you are using
the appropriate apache server model, with optimum configuration.
Apache site is pretty neat, if you want to check configurations. I am
sure you would have already done this.

2) You can cook up a small shell script which counts the user hits
from a specific IP, and then see, if you are being flooded by a
specific user. I say this, because this was precisely the cause in my
case.
If you think, a specific IP is being harsh, do a reverse lookup, and
see if it makes sense. otherwise block that IP using Deny , and serve
a 403 page instead.

3) Also, you can use tcp tools to check open sockets on apache
machine, and analyse them for any abnormality.


I used to run an apache/mysql/jboss/sendmail off
> On Thursday 01 November 2007 00:53:54 Ben Nolan wrote:
> > The server has 4GB of RAM and two reasonably meaty processors. This
> > shouldn't really be happening at all.
>
> This sort of spec should be able to cope with a great deal of traffic.
>
> > We're looking in to putting the MySQL server on a separate machine, as
> > well as possibly load-balancing the website itself with another box.
>
> And this I suspect will not fix the *real* problem.
>
> > This takes time and money, though; this is more about quick speed
> > fixes, something which the config posted previously seems to have
> > helped with.
>
> If I understood those config changes correctly (didn't look too closely)
> they were just allowing more clients to connect and wait for whatever
> it is waiting for.
>
> > I'm guessing there's a fairly major memory leak somewhere in the
> > software, but I'm not sure where it is.
>
> Something in the script, I reckon, but not a memory leak.
> Are you connecting to third party servers at all?
>
>
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