Am currently investigating whether we’ve been the victim of some serious DoS attacks over the last few days or if said ‘attacks’ have actually been enormous computer labs full of students signing up to, logging in to and uploading pictures to learnerblogs all at the same time.
I suspect it could be the latter!
With that in mind, in for a penny in for a pound, I’m increasing the RAM on the server by a gig (any experts out there know if / how much this might help… it’s basically MySQL queries issues that are causing the jam) and also enquiring whether any organisations with a selection of nice powerful servers and would be interested in hosting learnerblogs for a similar arrangement to the Chalkface edublogs.org one?
Let me know if you’re interested.
Have you tuned your MySQL DB lately? From my (admittedly limited) MySQL experience I have learnt how important it is to optimise your DB regularly and make sure that your queries are optimised.
Are there limits on the size of files that users can upload?
It may be that the physical bandwidth can’t handle the number of simultaneous uploads. In that case you need a bigger pipe.
The other recommendation would be to host your DB server on a different machine from your web server but that might not be realistic from an economic perspective.
Thanks M,
By ‘tuned’ what exactly do you mean, I have a pretty good tech support looking at it, I hope they’re tuning them!
Yes there are limits, I’ve lowered them but don’t know if that has helped, thanx for that too.
I think the pipe is almost as big as one can get though T something.
Will consider the dbase hosting idea and float it with hosts.
Would really appreciate any other ideas you have.
Might be time to break the database(s) onto a separate beefy server. Pretty much anything can handle the regular HTTP traffic, so your web hosting is likely fine. But moving the databases onto a dedicated Big Beefy Server may help quite a bit. In a perfect world (you know the one – where money doesn’t matter, and you can walk into the local Apple Store and carry out as many XServes as you like…) you’d have 3 web hosts (edublogs, learnerblogs, uniblogs), each with its own dedicated database server.
Plan B would be to have all web hosts on one box, all databases on another.
Plan C would be to just max out the one server, and optimize the hell out of the databases…
Or, if you’re willing to run some documentation and reviews, you could take Sun up on their offer of a free server…
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan?entry=niagara_benchmarks
It’s a Big Beefy Sun Server, about 10GHz when all CPUs are added up. That should be able to handle anything you can throw at it… :-)