Hi Traffic Brings Site Down

  • We run a membership site using S2Members, that also incorporates a vBulletin forum and a chat (although the chat is hosted elsewhere). We’re on a dedicated server, and yet we still have our site go down due to traffic spikes. There seems to be some memory issue. We’ve just recently had everything optimized and we are using Cloudflare as well. What are some possible causes for this? Our high traffic is only a little over 2,000 hits so it seems unusual for that to bring us down.

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  • This really depends on the amount of bandwidth your site has. Have you tried talking to the support operators who host your site?

    We’ve just recently had everything optimized….

    “Bandwidth” has very little to do with it; it’s the server, not the network to the server.

    What exactly was optimized? Many dedicated servers are sold out of the box and not configured for any sort of load. You need to log usage and load and adjust apache, mysql and php for performance and good memory usage. Running a forums is database intensive and will load a server with only a few thousand hits. Cloudflare and other CDNs can help by taking the image and scripts load off the server, but it won’t help with database intensive loads like a forum and many comments.

    Thread Starter Reflecting

    (@reflecting)

    Thank you for the information. How does one go about optimizing the server itself/database?

    Is your dedicated server managed?; if so, it’s the host’s responsibility, so ask them. If your server is unmanaged, you need to learn server administration or hire someone who knows what they are doing. Google “apache mysql server performance” to get an idea of the complexity of what needs to be done.

    If you can’t do the work yourself, consider looking for a reputable person to fix it correctly on jobs.wordpress.net or freelancing sites such as Elance. (It’s not a good idea to respond to unsolicited emails from forum users offering to work for you.)

    Thread Starter Reflecting

    (@reflecting)

    Thanks for the helpful advice. I’m thinking I may need to use an actual CDN service for the vBulletin as that might have been the source of the issue.

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