Serendipity Forums

Got this from my hosting company:

It's undeniablable that RAM usage on the server is very high. However, I'm thinking it may be a memory leak in one of your PHP codes. I restarted HTTP roughly 20 minutes ago, and the load went from 100+ to 2 and has remained there. By killing all the processes all the RAM would've been relesased, and if it was a load issue it should've resumed as soon as HTTP was back up. Are any of these sites very heavy on MySQL/PHP?

Thoughts?

Garvin?

i once had a similar problem with supersized.org, but not anymore. i don't think it was s9y itself but some other point of failure. which version of php do you use, do you run it as fastcgi or as a module (of apache)? what's your server's hardware and how many requests/s does it get?

Hi!

It's impossible that a PHP script can be the culprit for that.

PHP scripts cannot have memory leaks. Only the PHP core can. But usually, total RAM usage is more a problem of a bad webserver configuration. One should propery configure the amount of MySQL threads/workers as well as Apache workers, then this effect of RAM-outage cannot happen.

Sadly this is completely unrelated to Serendipity, but a general problem with Webserver setup/skills, and the principles of PHP. It mightalso simply be that the webserver is too weak for the amount of traffic you get. You can't expect a carriage with 4 horses to be as fast as a Ferrari

Best regards,
Garvin

Well, it can't be traffic either. We are only doing about 1,200 unique visitors a day. And as you're aware Garvin, we moved all the RSS stuff over to FeeBurner.

For the record... another symptom is swap creep. Whatever is causing the problem slowly increases the use of the swap file until I have to reboot Apache.

Hi!

Okay, then this is definitely related to problematic webserver setup.

PHP works sandboxed; if there are memory leaks, they are caused by webserver/PHP, not PHP applications. Check with your provider and work on the mysql/apache child/thread memory allocation. Also check for recent PHP versions and possible bytecode caches you'Re using.

I suggest you to go to a general webhosting forum to discuss possibilities to improve the situation, since maybe here there are less people skilled/specified in this area...

Best regards and I hope you find solution attempts,
Garvin

thanks Garvin.

I am going to go wrestle with my hosting company. I will report back with the findings.

best,

BC