Hi all,
I have a problem. Yesterday a very large influx of visitors to our site brought down our server! :( After some investigation we noticed that we had about 10K visitors in a 9min span before our server went down. We were told by our tech support that our server requires more memory (currently at 2GB) and to reduce the phpMemory limit (currently at 128MB) as well the the number of maximum Clients served.
While this is all ok and I can understand it, I am trying to find out how I could reduce the amount of memory needed by Drupal to still do it's job. I have some pages (some aggregated some views and nodes) that at some point in time require up to 35mb of memory (most being lower). I am using imagecache to create various thumbnails and other image sizes when certain views or pages are called.
How can I determine the 'right' amount of memory Drupal will need and set the phpmemory limit accordingly.
What else can I do in order to prevent another outage like this? I am already minimizing/aggregating CSS/JS files etc. I am throttling a few pages and logins to the site. How can I determine if the amount of modules is a cause or can be optimized?
The page that caused the particular outage only has text content an image or two, but is serving one sidebar with various blocks.
Any advice on making my site more stable is greatly appreciated,
S