Optimal Setup of Server

[noworyz]

With a brand new server with...

psa v8.1.1_build81070423.15 os_FedoraCore 6
Linux 2.6.9-023stab043.1-smp

Does anyone know a optimal setup of the server. For example, what would you change to any of the configurations to make the server have its best performance and have the best possible experience with it?

Thanks for your help.

 

[faris]

I'm not sure there is much, if anything, to worry about in terms of performance. I'm sure someone else will pitch in with some comments on this.

To me your biggest choice would be how to partition the hard disks, but most people just have /boot /(root) and sometimes a separate /tmp so that it can be mounted in a slightly more secure way (see below).

The size of your swap partition is also open to debate. 1.5 times the installed ram, twice the installed ram, the same as the installed ram etc etc. It doesn't really matter all that much as long as you have a good amount of Ram to start with (1Gig is good, more is better) for what may be a busy system.

Redundant hard disks are, in my opinion, also essential, and ideally done via a hardware raid controller. At the very least RAID5 (but probably not if you use software rather than hardware raid as software raid 5 can slow things down a lot according to some people), but mirroring is even better if you can afford the loss of 50% of your disk space. On a new system that we have just put online there is room for 4 2.5in 10k SAS hard disks. In the end we went RAID5 with this, but if we could have afforded larger drives we'd have gone RAID10 which would have given performance advantages and redandacy at the expense of 50% loss of hard disk space due to the mirroring. It breaks my heart really: On the workstations we have in the office we use 4x 500Gig drives in a raid10 configuration with software raid. That still gives us 1TB of disk space. But on a 1U server, with SAS rather than SATA drives, that's just not physically possible let alone affordable.

But I digress....

With a new install you may want to optimise for security more than anything else I think.

Here is a good place to start:

http://www.web-hosting-control-pane....php/HOW-TO_setup_a_PLESK_Dedicated_Server/6/

Faris.

 

[noworyz]

the main reason I ask is that it seems that my system is kinda bogged down. I have 1 gig ram (only using about 280 MB) and the cpu usage is really low yet the system resources are at 95-100% all the time. My sites seems to load kinda slow as well. I just don't understand what is causing this. What else is there to system resources rather than ram and CPU?

I am trying to optimize the server so that it runs better. It is through a hosting company as a VPS so I don't really have control over additional HD's and such. The hosting company jsut started using these VPS's and are not that technically knowledgeable about the VPS's so I am looking to optimize for security and performance.

Sorry for not making that so clear.

Any ideas with this additional info.

 

[faris]

Oh. Right. This is http://forum.swsoft.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=43530

Sorry. I didn't realise it was the same issue.

Faris.

 

[noworyz]

kinda. I was trying to set aside the other issues and actually get info on setting up the server/vps to where it opperates the best. In this thread I was looking for ideas on how best to configure the server rather than support the issues I am having. Sorry for two posts but does my thought make sense, is there a better way to get help with both directions that I am trying to go. I thought it would be best to separate the optimization and the troubleshooting.

 

[atomicturtle]

You're also at the mercy of what the other VPS's on the system are doing. They could be causing the performance problem, and there isnt really anything you can from the context of another VPS to improve performance. You'd need to make changes on the host OS.

 

[noworyz]

ahh, ok! Sounds good. How many people are usually on a VPS, or is that host dependent?

a VPS should always be better than shared hosting though right?

Someday I will understand this stuff

 

[atomicturtle]

Its host dependent, so theres no way to know really. Performance wise a shared hosting environment will scale farther, just because of the reduced overhead. The advantage of the VPS is that you've got more control of the system.

 

[faris]

Think of it like this:

On a server - a real physical server - you have certain resorces.

Now stick Plesk on it and add, say, 300 websites.

Pretend just one of those users gets spammed to high heaven, and their website contains some info that half the world wants to see.

The results is that you, as another user, and indeed all other users will find things slowing to a crawl. The one user's consumption will overpower everything else. (up to a point anyway)

Now imagine that same server but split up into, say, 4 VPSes.

One of the VPSes has the website mentioned above, complete with spam.

Another VPS belongs to you.

Exactly how your VPS will behave depends on the way the provider of the VPS has set things up. They may have set things up so that each VPS gets exactly 25% of the rousources of the server. If the server was quite basic to start with then this won't be brilliant but whatver happens to the vps containing the "mad" website it should not affect any of yours (though it would affect other websites in the same vps as the mad website).

But more likely they have split things another way, setting resource limits in such a way as to miximise the number of VPSes that can run at once without things going horribly wrong too often. Except maybe they are going a bit wrong - maybe another vps is using a lot of resources and this is having an impact on yours in some way. Your minimum quality of service may be too low basically, thus not guaranteeing you enough x, y or z to run what you need to run. It does not necessarily explain why plesk/apache is crashing on you though.

Again...this is just a guess.

Faris.

 

[noworyz]

thanks for the reply, it all is starting to make sense how these things run. I am the first person to have a VPS through the hosting company that I am working with so I am not sure that their are even other clients on the actual server yet.

I may have actually just figured out why my server is running slow and that is one of my sites has some code that I am using as a mod to phpbb and it seems this code is not optimized for the sql queries it is running. Once I get this code optimized, I will see how the server runs. It seems whenever I load a page with this code, the mysqld service is using like 80% of my cpu. Without the code, it uses barely anything. Thanks again for your help.

 

[faris]

I think you must be right. I'm confident that you'll find that fixing that will fix the problem completely.