Dedi upgrade advice

djvdorp

Currently have one Hetzner i7 dedi for a client: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4

It has pretty high load (seriously high traffic site). Server is connected at 100mbit now according to Hetzner. Server config is pretty much fine-tuned and still load spikes to 15.00 sometimes a day. Thats why I wonder:

Should I upgrade to 1gbit line (39euro extra upon the monthly plan) or go for a Xeon processor? (eg http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex6 for same amount of ram or http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex6s for double ram)

Thanks for your input all.

SimpleNode

I'm no expert, but afaik it depends on if it's a dynamic site with lots of php and stuff (better cpu?) or if it's just lots of static content (better network connection?).

Rikimaru90

Add or modify some configuration maybe?

AsadHaider

Are you sure that has a gigabit line, or is it gigabit nic to 100mbit port?

KuJoe

Are you actually hitting 100Mbps? If not, then upgrading to 1Gbps will help 0%. Upgrading the CPU/RAM will be much more beneficial.

klikli

How about PHP Caching? Do hetzner provide you a bandwidth graph? Seriously, most people don't really need a GE pipe.

djvdorp

@SimpleNode: thanks, it is dynamic (php) so CPU should be better.

@Rikimaru90: the config is done by a pro so I'm pretty confident that is pretty much fine-tuned already but might give it a try.

@AsadHaider: it currently has a Gbit NIC at 100mbit line, and Gbit line is an option.

@KuJoe: as far as my stats are telling me, no. bwm-ng tells me at max there is 8MB traffic while 100mbit should handle like ~12.5MB right?

@klikli: APC is installed and configured and about 99% hits cache the status page tells me. The bandwidth graph -for this month- is here: http://cl.ly/JeHi (cc also for @KuJoe's question)

klikli

I think you're getting like 16Mbps out per second in average. Will you consider offloading static content (like images, js, css) on a CDN or Amazon S3?

telephone

Are you using Apache? Is the DB continuously active?

djvdorp

@Telephone: no Its nginx with php5-fpm. DB is MySQL and is indeed used a lot (wordpress hand vbulletin)

@klikli: so thats 2MB/sec only? Like 1/6th of the 100mbit then. I use nginx so I hope I dont need a cdn as I might need to integrate it in all scripts then :(

NanoG6

If it's wordpress based then you can easily use plugin for cdn url rewrite

SDH_TREXTOR

@djvdorp said: Server config is pretty much fine-tuned and still load spikes to 15.00 sometimes a day. Thats why I wonder:

How long the spikes ? Since is only some times....

Are you running various cron at the same time that's spike are happening? Check that > could move the cron to low traffic dont know what you are cooking!

and if you have high traffic listen to "KuJoe " I will add to his comments<<< SSD >>>

telephone

Hmm could it be multiple backups being run? (Check cron to see what's running and when) Do you have any load graphs?

djvdorp

@telephone said: Hmm could it ?> be multiple backups being run? (Check cron to see what's running and when) Do you have any load graphs?

Problem is pretty much that all crons are done by ubuntu's cron.d directories, so I cant exactly seem to determine their "running time". I do not have any good load-graphs yet, besides CheckMyServers.com (which stopped monitoring a few weeks ago for no reason :( )

Voss

That sucks mate, they forgot to port limit me to 100Mbps [something that also occurs with Kimsufi] which is why I'm unwilling to relinquish my Hetzner dedicated server.

pcan

You will not get any CPU performance gain by upgrading from ex4 (core i7-2600) to ex6 (Xeon e3-1245). Both processors have the same microarchitecture and the Xeon is actually slower. All specifications are on ark.intel.com web site. The price increase is justified by the ECC Ram on Xeon processor. To reduce the load you should check where the bottleneck is. Slow consumer grade 7200 rpm Sata disks are a common culprit: more Ram would be beneficial because it reduces disk trashing. If you really need more CPU power, you must go for something substancially better: a 8 core or 2 x 4 core CPU could be a good start.

gsrdgrdghd

How about putting Varnish in front of Nginx?

JTR

@gsrdgrdghd said: How about putting Varnish in front of Nginx?

It sounds like his site needs realtime/dynamic PHP, so Varnish won't have a huge improvement (since he can't cache the php stuff). Still, he could probably use Varnish to cache static content.