[GeneralDiscussion] server outage, caching changes

On 12 Jan 2010 at 7:04, Simon Michael wrote:

> My server has been increasingly melting down due to heavy ill-behaved  
> bot traffic and trying to do too much in 1G of ram with not enough  
> sysadmin-fu; I had to walk away from it this weekend. Sorry for the  
> recent slowness and outages. I have been trying all kinds of  
> adjustments, as well as looking into reducing the free hosted zwikis,  
> moving zope to a cheaper vps and so on.

Sorry to hear this, though I don't think that RAM will be your 
problem.

> This week I have enabled apache's mod_disk_cache for all of joyful.com  
> & zwiki.org. Now those slow zope requests are being cached in /var/ 
> cache/apache2/mod_disk_cache, and server load is way down. But you may  
> not see very fresh results, I think depending on your browser. Eg the  
> last edited time at top right of wiki pages may be way wrong. I  
> suspect it should update itself after an hour, but maybe not. If in  
> doubt, try a shift-reload. Still working on this.

I would VERY strongly recommend deploying a nginx + varnish frontend 
to Zope instead of Apache. You'll get a fast, responsive and fresh 
website with no page being more than a few seconds out of date, and I 
was running that on 256Mb of RAM for around a year (I wouldn't 
recommend this though if anyone is logging in). 512Mb should be 
enough, and 1Gb more than plenty. That said, FsckVPS were doing a 25% 
off for life deal there before and you nowadays get a KVM rather than 
OpenVZ which makes it the best on the VPS market right now. Oh BTW 
you might find my site http://www.lowenddedi.net/ useful - it's a 
list of the cheapest Plone capable hosting providers along with 
reviews and tests.

I have an outdated guide along with testing results at 
http://www.nedprod.com/Niall_stuff/lowendDedicatedPloneServer.html. 
If you do decide to go down this route, let me know and I'll freshen 
that page with my latest config scripts - in particular my varnish 
default.vcl has evolved considerably over the past year. It's such a 
capable programming language!

HTH,
Niall


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