Do we need more RAM?

Wobble

Member
We run a site on 4GB of RAM and we may have up to 200 active members at a time and everyday around the same time we crash. Locked transactions and too many connections errors.

We have 3,000 members and about 950,000 posts.
 
The too many connections errors sounds like a server limitation related to MySQL.

You may want to look at increasing the value.
 
You may need more RAM, but your server may just need tuning and optimising.

I would look at getting someone in to tune it first.
 
Are you actually running out of RAM? You need to be monitoring your server when the crash occurs (or going through the logs) and see what's causing it. Just guessing as whether RAM is the issue is not going to help anything.
 
We run a site on 4GB of RAM and we may have up to 200 active members at a time and everyday around the same time we crash. Locked transactions and too many connections errors.

We have 3,000 members and about 950,000 posts.

We have 1.7M posts, and ~400 active users on quite regularly and don't even hit 2gb ram usage.

Locked transactions and too many connections could be being caused by a variety of things such as poorly coded addons, or your tables not being the correct format, or just poor my.cnf settings.
 
We have 1.7M posts, and ~400 active users on quite regularly and don't even hit 2gb ram usage.
Ow, 400~ simultaneous online and not hitting 2GB of ram?
All your web server (apache/nginx/litespeed), mysql server, elastic search, php, other other caching software are all in the same single Box?
 
Ow, 400~ simultaneous online and not hitting 2GB of ram?
All your web server (apache/nginx/litespeed), mysql server, elastic search, php, other other caching software are all in the same single Box?

Yes.
 
Nah that's impossible.
ES alone takes 512MB to 2GB of ram with your post.
And for 1.7M post you should allocate more than 2GB of ram for Innodb Engine.
So I don't think what you said is true, sorry.
 
Nah that's impossible.
ES alone takes 512MB to 2GB of ram with your post.
And for 1.7M post you should allocate more than 2GB of ram for Innodb Engine.
So I don't think what you said is true, sorry.

No your right, I completely miss read. Ignore me, our MySQL and ES are indeed offloaded.
 
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No your right, I completely miss read. Ignore me, our MySQL and ES are indeed offloaded.
Does the 2 GB statistic still hold true for the web server? If so, do you mind saying which http daemon you use and how PHP is invoked? I'm beginning to wonder if we have enough RAM as well, and it'd help to have a comparison.
 
@Slavik - What configuration would you recommend-

1. A single box with X GB of RAM
2. Two Boxes with x/2 RAM each dedicated to DB and Litespeed?
 
@Slavik - What configuration would you recommend-

1. A single box with X GB of RAM
2. Two Boxes with x/2 RAM each dedicated to DB and Litespeed?

It really is a matter of "it depends".

For 99% of people, keeping things on 1 server is going to be the easiest and best solution.
 
It really is a matter of "it depends".

For 99% of people, keeping things on 1 server is going to be the easiest and best solution.
Hmm, could you share more information about 'it depends' part? What factors are we talking about? My setup is typical xenforo with a few custom addons.
 
Hmm, could you share more information about 'it depends' part? What factors are we talking about? My setup is typical xenforo with a few custom addons.
It depends... are both servers hosted in the same data center and on a private network?
If I was going to do 2 servers, the DB server would be the "hoss" and the other one would be lighter on the memory. For most people that are talking real iron, a single server will suffice for them. Once you reach the point of needing multiple servers you will probably be looking at clustering.
 
Hmm, could you share more information about 'it depends' part? What factors are we talking about? My setup is typical xenforo with a few custom addons.

It's actually quite simple. Look at your server's current resource usage during the peak periods and start crunching numbers. Are you running out of resources, etc.? Will a server upgrade suffice, or do you need another to "load balance" your site?

Chances are, if you have to ask, you probably don't need multiple servers. When you need it, you'll know. :) Your forum will be big enough and busy enough to where you are constantly maxing out the resources on your single server.
 
And just to note...not sure if you have a dedicated or VPS or what you're using with Liquidweb (@TheBigK ) but you have about 1000 people online right now (mostly guests) and your site is blazing fast for me. I'm not exactly sure that 3AM my time (Pacific) is exactly a peak period for your site, but it certainly feels really quick, for having that many people on the site.
 
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