Come on Apache...

[music | Sleater-Kinney]

Today's been fun. Yesterday a site run by one of my friends (wolfeboro.net) was shut down by its ISP because they got a large influx of traffic, and the ISP panicked.

So today we moved it all over to my 1&1 Virtual Private Server. I managed to get their CMS up and running, and work out all the path and permissions issues, get caching working, etc. However Apache continues to be a bitch. Every so often it will spawn a whole bunch of httpd processes and run the machine out of memory. The only way I can keep working is to have a 'top' running always, because when this happens I can't run anything from the command line at all, so I can kill a couple PIDs in top and get my command prompt back to restart apache.

So, yeah, fun.

The root of the problem is that Nicolas Sarkozy is spending his vacation in Wolfeboro, NH, and Reuters linked to wolfeboro.net as a source of information. It's not /that/ much traffic either compared to what I'm used to serving. I guess it's time for me to learn a thing or two about apache performance tuning. I just don't know if I'm just beating the shit out of the virtual server, or how much traffic it should be able to handle. The only thing is that CPU is really low on the machine, it's just idling. I think their VM server might need a memory upgrade.