41–44 of 44 posts
600 MaxClients on a Linode box with 512MB RAM? At this point, it became quite clear that this article isn't going to be hugely useful.
what would you recommend instead?
Was written a few years back for a Linode 128MB.
No. Stop it. Never ever scale your blog. It sounds like the author was making the same mistake that pretty much everybody makes: Treating your blog as though it were dynamic content. But it's not. It's static HTML, and you should never have to make any modifications to anything to make it scale. Step one: Have your blog export all entries to plain HTML. Step two (optional): move your imagery out to S3/Cloudfront. Tha…
If the blog supports comments, it needs to talk to databases. Step one: Have your blog export all entries to plain HTML. He did that. A website hosting a blog, on the other hand, needs to serve files. And that's been a solved problem for fifteen years. "Too few Apache threads" is a known problem, which he recognized as soon as he saw the load numbers.
No it doesn't. Comments aren't added all that much relative to how much your site is getting hit. It would make more sense that the page is just a static html file with a form. The form submits to your app engine (php/python/whatever) which adds the data to the database. That then triggers your static html file to be rewritten to display that comment as well. The only other modification you "may" want to make is set it so that browsers don't cache your html page so they can see new comments if they refresh.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
what would you recommend instead?
Apache's memory usage should not exceed the available RAM on the machine. If you do that, it starts having to use swap, which drastically slows things down - if you're already getting lots of hits, it'll start a death spiral. Apache's memory usage varies based on what modules are enabled and the code they're serving and a number of other factors. The rule of thumb is to take the average free RAM when Apache isn't run…