Turn OFF WEBALIZER

[deathshadow]

Seriously. Our site was having odd outages where the forums became unusable for five to fifteen minutes at the oddest hours of the day (no rhyme nor reason to when, ranged from peak hours to lowest), all four CPU cores (It's a dual Xeon) reporting 99%+ IOWAIT. We tried all sorts of damned things, but finally I noticed that under TOP webalizer kept cropping up during this time. Tried flushing the logs manually and that semi-alleviated the error for like 8 hours...

So we disabled webalizer and our average CPU load has gone from 6.4, 7.2, 7.1 to 0.31, 0.42, 0.4

I don't know if anybody else is having similar issues, but if you have webalizer running on your server, and are having problems... Give it a try.

We were about to sink another hundred a month onto our plan to jump to the dual Xeon 3.6 with 4 gigs RAM on the 1gbps connect.... Now our dual Xeon 2.8 with a gig of RAM on a 100mbps is proving MORE than up to the task, hell we've got CPU to spare.

Oddly, I think Webalizer hogging CPU is what got us kicked off our previous host, as the numbers they were reporting didn't reflect our traffic at the time (we were on UBBThreads for forum software at that point, and had a quarter our current traffic) , and since a great MANY hosting companies seem to install Webalizer by default on their servers...

[Ben_S]

How big are your log files, sounds like you aren't rotating them enough. Although you may just have a huge site.

[deathshadow]

Increasing the rotation only made it worse, not better... Just scrapped it. Damn server came with Analog, Webalizer AND Urchin installed... How many {censored} tracking packages does one server need?

That we're sharing the server with other sites doesn't help, although our load numbers before (7's) and now (under 0.1) with the only change being turning webalizer off...

As for traffic, I don't consider it THAT heavy... 1500+ posts a day with about 120 user peaks isn't big stuff...

But then my views on this is skewed... over a decade ago I was serving more data than some little message board could ever generate to 4000+ users with nothing more than Netware 3.12 on a 486/66. I'm actually a little disgusted at the system requirements these days to serve less data to less users.

But in case you couldn't guess, It's been a decade since I've done this sort of thing for a living. Retirement has it's perks.