I currently have a Dual Xeon 3.4GHz with 2GB RAM and 2 250GB HDD's.

I'm hosting one site with it that gets a decent amount of traffic and has a fairly busy forum. The site gets about 8 million pageviews a month and the forums report there are usually around 500 members on within the last 15 minutes. I go through anywhere from 1200 to 1600 gigabytes of bandwidth a month.

I've been having problems off and on for a few months now and I've done a lot of optimizing but it still has been getting progressively more busy and lately has been getting a lot worse with the server load just going through the roof sometimes.... like this:



That always happens in spurts too. The site will run just fine for about 30 minutes and suddenly the load will take off and then gradually come back down after about 5 minutes of being that high.

Does anyone know if I should be able to run a site like I have with my current server and I just need to work on optimizing it better or is it time for an upgrade? I've thought about getting a load balanced pair and running mysql on one and then everything else on the other but it seems I remember reading something about how the traffic is limited to 10mbps between the two and I could run into a bottleneck. The other option above what I currently have is the monster series but they start at $1,000/month and I'm running this site with a limited budget.

Golly golly golly. You made a HUGE mistake when you've ordered your server.

Notice the "2 250GB drives" line. 250GB drives are 7200RPM SATA drives. You had the option to get two 74GB drives, which are 15000RPM SCSI drives.

Looking from your top output, the most usage is used in iowait. Which means that your hard drive is the bottleneck. Your swap is also through the roof. You need more RAM!

Getting more RAM for caching will help aswell.

Take my advice:
1) Get in touch with EV1 and see if you could switch to SCSI drives. This will improve your performance GREATLY. When you get them, be sure to put MySQL on the second drive.
2) Get more RAM. More RAM means more caching. More caching means less hard drive activity and better performance.
3) Optimize Apache and MySQL. You can't lose anything by doing this.

If you need any help or suggestions, feel free to PM/contact me.

Thanks for the reply and advice. I'll look into those options.

What I originally ordered was actually a "Dual Xeon - 2.4Ghz - Redhat Enterprise - cPanel - 2-73GBHD - 2GB RAM - DRAC Card" and that is even what it says I still have in server command. It wasn't until after I had already had the server mostly setup that I realized it was a 3.40Ghz with 2-250gb drives. I didn't complain since I figured the 3.4Ghz was a much better option than the 2.4 and it ran my site fairly well for the last year up until a few months ago.

I have done quite a bit of optimization with Apache and MySQL and I did move the mysql database to the 2nd harddrive. I'm not a pro but I spent a lot of time reading these and other forums so I think I've got the software side of things setup pretty good.

I looked under hardware upgrades in server command and I see a 2gb to 4gb ram upgrade is available. I'll definitely do that and I'll e-mail them to see if there is any way to swap in SCSI drives.

Hmm...
You have to see if your MySQL and Apache optimizations were done right. Try restoring to the default configuration.
I think you put too many processes for Apache and they are bogging down.

If I can't get EV1 to swap my harddrives to SCSI do you think it would help at all if I went from 2GB of RAM to 4GB? Or will the bottleneck with the SATA drives pretty much make a memory upgrade useless?

I see now that there is an option in servercommand to upgrade to another harddrive. What if I added a 73GB SCSI 15K RPM drive and used it exclusively for my SQL database? Do you think that would help out with iowait?