Hi all,

I currently have a RHE3 with cPanel on a server with 1gig processor and 500mb memory. As I increase the amount of customers on this server, I have noticed it is becoming bogged down, particularly by MySQL and mail.

What I would like to do, is separate my customers sites up in terms of size, i.e. the bigger the site, the more important. Therefore I would need two servers but I am not sure whether it would be better to put the larger customers on one server and the smaller ones on another and keep them separate or put them all on one and use the second server for DB's and Mail.

Can someone please help me out as I am not sure what is best.

Thanks
Liam

Liam
You need to decide what is your primary goal -- performance, redundancy or both.

Dedicated mysql/mail server
If you use a dedicated mail/database servers, you have to make sure your clients know how to properly setup remote database connections. Also, they may need some way of access the secondary server via myadmin or the shell. Such setups can be effective but many things may have to change to implement it ...

Move clients to a new server
An easier approach is just to move some of your clients to another server -- this way performance issues on one machine will not impact the others. Provide you set up the servers identically, all you would have to change is DNS after you migrate the sites

Optimize your current system
You stated that you have 512MB of ram. I suspect that is your current bottleneck. Most servers, especially if you have a control panel, require at least 1GB of ram to reduce swap usage. You may want to install sysstat and monitor your swap usage. If swap usage is over 10%, then you will have performance issues, especially with mysql. Also, if these are php/mysql sites, you may want to consider a caching tool like eaccelerator. Lastly, mysql 4 with query caching can speed things up in some cases as well.


Before jumping into dual servers, I advise that you or someone do a current system analysis to identify the bottleneck. Perhaps there is a runaway script on the server? Or a script with a memory leak? In which case a secondary system may only mask rather than correct the problem.