Hello all,

I have a server with maybe 20-some sites also with e-mail. We have lately been experiencing major spped issues and problems with getting "this page not available" and then soon as you hit refresh it slowly comes up.

I am looking for some help on how to solve this. I read through the Load Balancing FAQ and the one issue that I think I would have is that I have mySQL databases that would need to be really well synced. There is info constantly being updated and pulled from the sites.

I am looking for options and thought this section of the forum might be the best place to ask my questions since load balancing focuses on speed.

1. Would load balancing work for me with all my SQL needs?

2. If not, can you seperate the MySQL on one server and page processing on another, would that reduce my load.

3. Would taking my e-mail off the server help? And where could I put it, do I need a whole new server just for e-mail or is there another option.

4. This is probably the most important question. How do I determine what is causing the slowness and bogging down my server? I used mem to look at my process and memory, but I don't know enough to get a good answer out of this.

This is a huge problem for me and needs to be solved soon. I have been looking at more powerful servers here and at RackSpace, but I want to avoid having to try moving a bunch of dynamic sites to a new server. Most important though is this get solved.

I would appreciate any help or insight you can give!!

Thanks

Load balancing is intended for applications that are written in such a way to take advantage of such a situation. Not for hosting multiple customer shared-hosting servers. You're better off finding out what is consuming your CPU and correcting the issue rather than trying load balancing.

If you really wanted to do this, the easiest way would be to put the database on a single dedicated server, and then load balance the web servers. That is-- assuming the system load isn't actually some crazy SQL query that's dragging everything down.

You're better off probably to look at which queries are most time consuming and optimize them. Usually, adding some indices to tables can help speed things up a lot. Another thing you can try is query caching (this is supported by e.g. mysql).

It really depends on the extent to which you have control over those sites. If they are shared hosting customers, you can consider adding limits per account so that only they suffer from their own non-optimized queries.